AU: Giving people reasons to buy more bananas

The banana industry has a problem when it comes to marketing - but it is a good one to have, according to Horticulture Innovation Australia.

Speaking at the Australian Banana Industry conference, Elisa King who is Marketing Manager responsible for the fruit, told the conference that recent data found 94 per cent of households buy bananas each year. The problem with that is building on the amount of sales.

"The answer is to give people more reasons to buy us more often," she explains. "That is our primary campaign objective, which is about increasing purchase frequency." 

In the past two years up until May, Ms King recalls data from Nielsen showing shopping trips have increased by 1.5 occasions and increased the number of bananas by 1.3 kilos. This is backed up by surveys, with research showing 78 per cent of people in 2015 stating they had bananas once a week, increasing to 82 per cent now. She says this was done by being smarter about campaigns, meaning advertising is purchased at places closest to message and times of day most likely to trigger a response. 

Despite the emergence of online platforms, Ms King says television remains the best form of media for creating awareness and keeping the product in people's mind. Data shows 85 per cent of people still view traditional TV, but she says it is increasingly important to capitalise on online technology, such as catch-up television. 

"We can only afford to be on TV a few times a year because it is expensive," Ms King said. "But when we are on TV we reach a large number of people. In the past year, it is just over 11 million eyeballs we have got to but we compliment that with our digital advertising, our catch up TV, and we book premium episodes. In the past 12 months we have had 4.5 million views."

This form of advertising is followed up, with other methods, such as posters on billboards and buses, which act as time triggers, encouraging people on the way to work or during lunch breaks and shopping trips.

"We can also advertise to people in lifts when they are going out to get their cup of coffee and remind them to snack on a banana instead of a muesli bar or bad pack of chips," she points out. "So technology is clever, and what we can do now is that we can target key words. What this means is that if someone is typing in 'muffin recipe', we can actually serve them up with a banana ad."

She says the best form of converting awareness into action and actual purchase is out of home advertising in shopping centres, with reminders at, or just outside retail outlets. 70 per cent of banana advertising panels are outside the major supermarkets; Coles, Woolworths and Aldi and provide another reminder to buy a banana.

The mainstream advertising runs for less than half of the year, with the remaining months catered to by other forms such as Public relations, merchandise, education and social media. Ms King explains that Australia has more than 16 million Facebook users, who spend on average 12.5 hours a week scrolling through their news feed. So the Australian Bananas page offers a combination of posts relating to recipes, health and energy benefits and entertainment, because "bananas are fun".

"We just blow them (other forms of snacks) out of the water when you look at engagement rate," Ms King said. "If you want to delve a bit deeper and find out how meaningful that is; it is pretty easy to give a post a like, it's a bit harder to give it a love, or a 'lol', or an angry face. To comment is even longer. But to share a brand’s content on your page, must mean you are proud of that brand. So looking at our competitors, we are doing pretty well." 

Australian Bananas also broke the world record for the largest banana split.