As anyone who is on this site knows, organic is the new Starbucks, the new “It Girl”, and while it has profit-hungry supermarkets looking for new ways to reach customers, it still isn’t on everyone’s dinner table or even on their brain.So while the fourth year of the Go Organic! campaign is no longer the marketing equivalent of swimming against the tide, challenges still exist, especially in a culture when people expect food to be cheap, and frankly, they don’t always seem to care what it tastes like.
The campaign, a project of the Organic Trade Association Organic Trade Association and produced in partnership with marketing and event promoter Music Matters, the campaign achieves several goals. It raises awareness of organic products among shoppers at conventional supermarkets. And the effort is also a joint marketing venture, creating increased sales for participating vendors and also helps supermarkets increase sales of organic products.And the results have been strong. According to the OTA, in 2007 the program “featured information about organic products and agriculture in more than 50 retail grocery chains nationwide, representing more than 3,550 stores and 35 leading organic brands. According to SPINS data for past campaigns, participating retailers achieved more than a 40 percent higher rate of growth of sponsors’ products when compared with non-participating retailers.”
We’ll get some more figures on this year’s efforts as well, and see if we can get some feedback from some retailer participants, to see what they noticed about the greening of the conventional retail landscape.
