Fonterra looks at NZMP rebrand

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON

Fonterra is considering using its own name as a brand to replace the NZMP trademark that its $7.7 billion ingredients business uses.

NZMP is the largest dairy ingredients organisation in the world, marketing products in 100 countries.

The NZMP name was notably absent from Fonterra's half-year result report last week, replaced simply with the term "ingredients business".

Fonterra chief executive Craig Norgate told the Business Herald yesterday the company was assessing the use of NZMP as a brand in the overseas market.

"But in New Zealand people work for Fonterra," he said.

That could signal that the company - which since its formation 16 months ago has rebranded its 29 factories, some of its office buildings and all of its milk tankers with NZMP - will launch another re-naming exercise.

An industry commentator yesterday described the possible rebranding a retrograde step.

NZMP was in a unique selling position because of the use of the NZ for New Zealand. "It's a big brand. No one knows Fonterra."

Branding was a delicate area and the company should be building on what it had rather than doing an about-face.

He feared Fonterra was simply determined to purge a name from the past.

The NZMP logo was launched in 1999 when the Fonterra marketing forerunner, the Dairy Board, moved to provide greater separation between its ingredients business and its consumer products division, NZ Milk.

But NZMP as an acronym for New Zealand Milk Products has been around for much longer, largely because customers shortened the more unwieldy title.

In promotional material the company says "the distinctive NZMP logo and colours on all our packaging is our customers' guarantee of the quality and integrity of the product inside".

Last October, Fonterra started to put the skids under NZMP as a separate entity when it said it was taking its major subsidiary into its heart - prompting the resignation of NZMP managing director and Fonterra deputy chief executive Chris Moller.

NZMP's Wellington head office - the Dairy Board's Pastoral House - is being closed and its operations are moving to Auckland, Hamilton and Palmerston North.

The name Fonterra was launched in August 2001 as a name for the new corporate entity. It was not to appear on any product, just on the company's Auckland airport head office.

The business end of exporting and selling dairy products was still to be done by NZ Milk and NZMP.

Brands such as Anchor and Tararua - which itself was axed this week in favour of Meadow Fresh - were to live on.