To help offset the growing competition, Halifax-based Farmers Dairy is launching a new marketing campaign this month spotlighting the stories of local farmers, and by extension, the importance of buying local. With a new tagline, ‘We are your Farmers,’ a series of outdoor and print ads featuring dairy farming families producing milk for Farmers Dairy, aim to highlight the co-operative nature of the business and the importance of paying attention to the origins of food.
‘We want consumers to recognize that buying from local farms contributes to the regional and provincial economy, and to their health,’ says Ralph Ballam, CEO of Farmers Dairy and a shareholder farmer with the company. ‘We are a co-operative dairy, so that means our shareholder farmers own the company and have a say in what we produce – from the cow to the carton.’
Targeting Nova Scotian grocery buyers, skewed female, the campaign is also designed to appeal to those with an affinity for locally made products.
With St. John’s M5 Marketing Communications’ Halifax office coordinating both the media buy and the campaign, print ads are running in community papers across Nova Scotia – four dailies and eight weeklies running until the end of the month, including the Chronicle Herald Provincial and Metro. Outdoor billboard ads including numerous delivery trailers (some as large as 53′ were decaled with campaign), will cover high-traffic areas in both Halifax and Dartmouth.
The media strategy? To combine placements in the larger urban center of Halifax Regional Municipality with more grassroots exposure, like delivery trucks and community papers, to reach out to the communities that have supported Farmers shareholders for so long.
‘The imagery in the campaign is captivating,’ M5 senior consultant Holly Dunn tells MiC, ‘so large-scale executions seemed only appropriate, hence the billboards and trucks. But the community papers have such strong readership in their respective communities so analytically we felt that those that have an appreciation for their local community paper, may be more likely to have an appreciation for local products too.’
M5 is conducting media relations with main stream outlets, and is posting information about the local shareholders on the Farmers Dairy site.
