After a reasonable amount of time has passed, there is no need to explain the reason for the loss of prestige suffered by the Spanish cucumber. In fact, this post will not talk about accusations, politics or culprits, but rather about consequences and solutions from the perspective of marketing and the poor positioning of cucumber-like products.
It is clear that after accusations of such magnitude, the economy has been affected: restaurants that eliminate dishes from their menus that require cucumber, supermarkets that lower their demand, stoppage of machines in factories where cucumber is a raw material (gazpacho, broth, juices...), insurers that increase the fee due to the increase in risk in the sector, even tetrabrik manufacturers could also be affected. harmed and all this not to mention farmers, producers, distributors, investors... Mass media have already placed the losses at more than 200 million euros in losses, in addition to lost profits. Directly or indirectly it affects many sectors given that it is a primary product.
Jack Trout (father of positioning) in several books talks about perceptions and how negative actions or bad publicity influence them. <
Just by searching for news about cucumber on Google or YouTube we have a long list of links linked to the statements and consequences that they could have; fact that did not happen two months ago. All these links stay there and are difficult to remove. Events notable enough would have to happen to position these links on secondary pages and clean the search engines and minds of consumers.
What can those of us who are dedicated to marketing do? Actions in favor of the good positioning of the tuber and the Mediterranean diet in general. All the resources that are allocated to claiming compensation, in lawyers, trials... could be allocated, from minute zero, to the positioning of the cucumber. I think that the competent authorities should make more marketing efforts and start from the first moment to minimize the negative impact that is occurring and has occurred. In Spain there have already been sectors that have mobilized and once Germany has blamed itself, they have also organized actions in favor of good positioning.
We can measure all these actions through market research. In this way we can analyze the effects and the change in attitudes after investing in communication, for example. With positioning engineering techniques, we could measure the distance of the product (in this case, the cucumber and its associated attributes) to the market ideal and how through communication we can get closer to the ideal and reduce the negative effects caused by the error regarding the Spanish cucumber poisoned by E.Coli.
I leave you with two campaigns. The first broadcast on television a few days after the statements, although now it can only be seen online, the second, German, of lesser scope:
Both actions respond to the viral marketing strategy, in addition to the search for notoriety by their authors who try to improve the image of the sector. horticulture, each one in their country. It is effective, and since it is viral marketing, it is cheap. Each group that tries to position the cucumber as a clean product would also achieve notoriety, a good image and awareness of the problem.
Alfons Rotger
