The new plan would involve more development work in key, mature markets alongside the export companies, Parsons said.
Promotions would be made only if companies were prepared to follow through with products and had already helped to develop the strategy.
The initiatives came at a time when the latest survey of sheep and beef farm confidence showed the sector went into Christmas with confidence at just 32%, down from just over 40% previously and reflecting meat and wool prices and weather patterns.
Farmers whose income was largely from sheep had significantly less confidence than the overall figure, dragged up by still-confident beef producers with a positive impact, especially in Northland and Waikato, Parsons said.
He took heart from an increase in farmer satisfaction with B+LNZ, up 7% to 53%, indicating the industry-good agency was doing better and improved communications meant farmers also better understood the work it was doing.
However, 79% of farmers said promoting NZ beef and lamb in international markets was a very important activity but only 37% thought it was doing a good job in that area.
“As farmers, we’re never generally satisfied with prices and if I was doing the survey I would say that too,” was Parsons’ response.
“It’s understandable. We can do better and that’s the reason for our new market development strategy.”
Historically, B+LNZ had worked to create new markets but once they were established the development had been left to the companies.
That had been changing in recent years and now the cross-sector collaboration was strongly supported by both farmer and exporter views sought by the group.
There was already a successful example of that approach in the German lamb market, where B+LNZ had led in-store presentations, partnering exporters and German importers, Parsons said.
As a result, it had built up from low volumes to being a significant market for NZ and other countries had adopted the same marketing approach.
Another potential opportunity was in promoting NZ grass-fed beef in the United States, both for prime cuts and in the manufacturing market, and there could also be gains there for grass-fed lambs because lamb consumption per person was very low.
Any grass-fed promotion project was “not locked and loaded” yet and it was too early to give details on other plans being considered.
The work was all designed to add confidence to the red met sector because that was the key to farmers investing, he said.
There had also been a lot of work around that in the Red Meat Profit Partnership (RMPP) project, which had found high-performing farmers retained their confidence regardless of product price levels.
One of the aims of RMPP was to understand how that was achieved and transfer the knowledge to other farmers.
