The story of building a Vietnamese brand in the “land of kangaroos"”

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Australian customers experience and choose to buy Meet & More coffee products at supermarkets. Photo: provided by the compamy

Success stories

Recently sharing with Customs Newspaper, Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Luan, CEO of Global Trade Link Company Limited (Meet & More Coffee) said that in 2023, while the company's key markets such as Korea, Russia, and the US all declined, but Meet & More's export to the Australian market recorded impressive growth. Meet & More's sales reached over US$ 1 million in 2023, while previous years were only about US$ 500,000. This has helped Australia become the market number 1 for this company, accounting for 40% of export sales.

This result became more impressive when these export sales came from fruit coffee products under the Meet & More brand founded by Mr. Luan. Mr. Luan shared that when exporting to the Australian market, the first thing was register for trademark protection in this country. Because when bringing products into Australia, having an exclusively registered brand was one of the evaluation criteria of this country's government. Besides, registering for trademark protection also helped bring confidence to them in the business process there.

At a recent conference held in Ho Chi Minh City, Ms. Nguyen Thu Huong, Trade Attaché of the Vietnam Trade Office in Australia also shared interesting information about branding for Vietnamese agricultural products that the Trade Affair has implemented. in the Australian market.

Specifically, in 2019, consumers in Australia only knew about Thai rice. The fact that Vietnamese charity programs in Australia had to buy Thai rice to give to Vietnamese people made everyone in the Trade Affair sad. Therefore, when ST25 rice won the "World's Best Rice" award in 2019, the Trade Affair simultaneously deployed promotional activities with trial activities of ST25 rice and other types of Vietnamese rice, even though at that time ST25 rice had not been yet available. in Australia. This contributed to motivating many importers here to be interested in importing ST25 rice. Up to now, Vietnamese rice with all kinds of brands has been popular in Australia.

Durian Ri6 is also a successful example in Australia. Ms. Huong said that when surveying the market in 2019, the Trade Affair found that the Australian market only had Thai and Malaysian durians, and Vietnamese durians were only in small quantities and were mainly used to make cakes. Contacting importers, all refused to import Vietnamese frozen durian, because Australia was used to eating Monthong and Musang King products.

After careful research, the Trade Affair chose Ri6 durian to promote in Australia. Specifically, the Trade Affair mobilized and asked a familiar importer in Australia to import half a ton of durians to carry out a program promoting Ri6 durians on the streets of Sydney, in central areas such as the Sydney Opera House, large squares to attract media attention and for stores to explore the market... Next, in 2020, the Trade Affair mobilized a company to simultaneously bring whole fruits of frozen durian into supermarket stores.

As a result, this batch of goods was “sold out”, and even a store in Marrickville complained about not being able to distribute Ri6. From this event and many subsequent continuous promotional activities, Ri6 durian had a great reputation in Australia, at one point, the price was only slightly lower than Musang King and a series of corporate brands associated with Ri6 were born in Australia.

Many support activities

Looking back at the journey of building the brand of ST25 rice and Ri6 durian in the “land of kangaroos”, Ms. Huong said that despite having a certain foothold, the dream of the Ri6 deal approaching Musang King's price had not yet been achieved. Because on products, no Vietnamese agency could determine the use of the terms type 1 and type 2. Therefore, Ms. Huong thought that branding must come from clear standards, guaranteed and homogenize quality for all shipments.

Regarding this issue, Mr. Luan said that the Australian market had very high requirements for safety. In particular, food products need to be inspected to meet the criteria before being granted an import license. Even if entering large supermarkets, the requirements would be even higher, in addition to food safety and hygiene criteria, technology, it also need welfare criteria...

Regarding price, Mr. Luan also said that foreign distributors often tended to squeeze prices as deeply as possible. Therefore, many enterprises sometimes had to accept low prices to ‘sell products first”, then negotiated marketing costs... But Meet & More did not do that. Specifically, when negotiating, Mr. Luan always tried to keep the selling price, for the marketing, the company would do or support the distributor. “The most important factor is that our products must be diverse, rich, good quality and accepted by the market’, Mr. Luan emphasized.

Regarding supporting businesses to promote their brands in the Australian market, Ms. Huong affirmed: “As long as enterprises build a brand associated with quality products, the Trade Affair will make every effort to make that brand famous”. Specifically, the Trade Affair would support enterprises to display products and brands for non-free at major international fairs during the year that the Trade Affair participated in such as: Finefood, Foodservice, Globalsourcing Expo... Accordingly, the enterprises's brand would connect with more than 10,000 importers at events.

The Affair also prioritizes supporting import-export connections with large importers in Australia and supermarkets; participate in stimulus programs. For example, in 2023, there were a program to buy Vietnamese litchis to win high-value round-trip air tickets. Or in 2022, there also were a reward program at 25 MCQ supermarkets in Perth city for customers to buy Vietnamese products...

The Affair also has a consulting program or coordinates consulting program on packaging design, marketing, customer contact, until it becomes famous for new enterprises and enterprises exporting new products. With the first shipments of agricultural and aquatic products, the Trade Affair can launch advertisements on platforms in Australia to let consumers know about the products...

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