Rural Delivery: What's in a name?

By JANET TYSON*

However you rate Fonterra for its performance in the past year, it has been an undisputed success on one essential count: everyone knows its name.

A year ago we were racing to Latin dictionaries or Holden dealer manuals to make some sense of the new corporate brand. Today, most New Zealanders would recognise the word Fonterra, subconsciously adding "the giant dairy co-operative".

This is worth considering, as the legislative death of the Wool Board approaches and a joint wool and meat entity will be asking farmers to pay voluntary levies.

The primary sector has so far seemed underwhelmed by what will, in effect, also be the passing of the Meat Board as we know it.

But is it so surprising that it has been hard to grasp the big implications of the announcement that the Meat Board and the Wool Board, historically and culturally quite separate entities, will join forces?

Since the McKinsey Report on the wool industry, and the new commercial focus on research in the age of biotechnology, a deluge of new industry structures has been created, often with almost identical names. There's Ovita and Covita; Merino New Zealand and New Zealand Merino, SheepCo and BasCo (Beef and Sheep Co).

So how is the latest, and so far unnamed idea, distinguished from or weighed against this proliferation of organisational offshoots? What will be its relationship to Wronz, Wool Interiors, OneWool, Strong Wools, Wool Equities or Meat and Wool Innovation, the umbrella organisation that encompasses WoolPro, Meat New Zealand R and D, and the Economic Service, formerly known as Primary Economics, and before that known as the Meat and Wool Boards Economic Service?

The private sector is no better at naming its creations so they stand out in the mind: witness the debut of On-Farm Research Ltd, and before that, the Primary Wool Co-operative.

You can't demand that each business group within an organisation be blessed with a name that is distinctive, cleverly sums up what it is about, and is totally memorable.

But when you establish something new and different that needs to make its mark, a name that stands out is all-important. Even more so if you want people of diverse views to pull together behind it, and willingly hand over their hard-earned dollars to it.

Also important is the working title used during the consultation period. Again, the dairy industry made a brilliant choice with GlobalCo.

Everyone knew it was a temporary name, and at the same time they knew it was something completely different.

A long name will do, if it makes for a memorable acronym. The Primary Producers Co-operative Society is proof of that, and so is the Auckland Farmers Freezing Company.

Farmer workshops are meeting to examine the meat-wool concept now.

I hope that a working title is also on the agenda, so the farmers who have to fork out the money get a more concrete concept of what they're discussing, and eventually voting on. And that the combined organisation supports the choice of a really creative name as the ultimate brand identity.

The Combined Beef, Sheepmeat and Wool Organisation for the Raising of Commodity Levies under the Commodity Levies Act? Perhaps not.

MoolCo? LeviesCo? Or maybe to show the Wool Board lives on in spirit, ElvisCo? It fits with the name coined for its disestablishment, DisCo.

* Janet Tyson is a freelance researcher, editor and writer specialising in agriculture.