Giving radiata pine the hard sell

By PAUL PANCKHURST

Here's the marketing problem: A Carter Holt Harvey subsidiary has a product that is made of radiata pine but has the properties of a hardwood.

It goes by the brand name of Green Seal. Green Seal can be used for furniture or flooring or joinery.

There is a "sustainability" story for Green Seal that the Carter Holt subsidiary, the Tauranga-based Pacific Hardwood, is keen to exploit. That is, the firm says people can feel good about saving the world's hardwood forests if they walk around on floors made of Green Seal.

But here is the rub. How is it going to get people to believe Green Seal is really different from radiata?

Pacific Hardwood marketing manager Warren Moore says the firm is "trying to get people to understand that it doesn't necessarily have to look like pine when you make something with it".

The most effective way of selling people on the product is "to get a piece into their hands. They wouldn't know it is radiata".

According to Moore, when people see the product, "they go: 'How the hell can you do that? I don't believe you'." They do a mind flip.

The target audience that Pacific Hardwood wants to convince is made up of designers and architects - with the hope that interest from those groups will draw more manufacturers into using the product.

Imagine, now, a marketing budget of up to $100,000. That would buy a fair whack of full-page ads in trade magazines. Or a lot of face-to-face presentations to potential users. Or a pretty tidy direct-marketing campaign.

Maybe samples of Green Seal could have been posted out for architects and designers to fondle.

What Pacific Hardwood plumped for, on the advice of Locus Research, a design company in Mt Maunganui, was off to one side of a traditional advertising campaign.

The idea: To create a competition for designers to make furniture out of Green Seal.

The winners of a $10,000 prize (the professional category) and a trip to Milan (the student category) were announced at a function at the Auckland Museum last week. The finalists are being exhibited at the museum in a show called Metaform 03, until September 7.

The exercise got the product into the hands of design enthusiasts, created possibilities for publicity spinoffs, and gave tangible form to the claims about Green Seal's hardwood-type properties.

According to Carter Holt, the contest drew more than 120 entries, with students at three design schools taking part. Publicity material for the event highlighted the sustainability angle, describing the competition as designed "to promote the intelligent use of sustainable materials in New Zealand" and "a showcase of environmentally sympathetic design".

A design magazine was one of the sponsors of the exhibition. Moore said Pacific Hardwood would also show the exhibition to local manufacturers and overseas contacts.

According to Moore, the exercise has cost "the thick end of $100,000" if time and materials are included. Design schools were supplied one batch of Green Seal for the students to experiment, and then another for them to construct their entries.

According to Carter Holt, Forest Research started developing Green Seal in 1985 and it was licensed to Pacific Hardwood in 2000.

The winner of the competition, furniture designer Neal Smith, said while Green Seal's technical capabilities were known, there had previously been little information presented from "an emotional or end-user point of view".