Anomalies and Tasks of the Hungarian Collective Marketing

Abstract

Collective marketing is a special field of marketing studies. It has an important part in agriculture because some products or enterprises cannot do marketing activity by themselves, so they need a partner for this. The collective form of marketing is advantageous for the participants be-cause they can keep the independence of their basic activity, but they can share the costs of promotion, market research, participation in exhibi-tions and product strategy (branding), not mentioning the uniform negotiation position. In Hungary collective marketing has no tradition, so it can be useful for the Hungarian practice to analyse the different forms of marketing. It is quite clear from our research that effective section and national collective marketing activity cannot be carried out without producers’ groups and marketing cooperatives. The foreign collective mar-keting organizations have many-sided activities, and besides protecting the domestic market they pursue important export-marketing activity as well. In every Western-European country the collective marketing organizations put great emphasis on market-research activity, training-education and on making attitude to marketing conscious (these activities in Hungary are under-valued). Deriving from the mature market situa-tion, the collective market organizations do not only urge the selling of mass products, but they draw their attention to regional specialities, amongst them to traditional, local as well as to organic products. The collective marketing of section level must especially concentrate on the neutral promotion of the company- and brand names of cheese and milk. The reason is that their common share of the national sale reaches 70% in liquid. We have a lot of information about that people are not aware of the origin, ingredients and mostly of the nutrition-biological advan-tages of some products. In addition Hungarian people are distrustful of the industrial mass products and their producers. Our concern is how do these unfavourable tendencies effect the consumers’ behaviour, that is how do shoppers react to the present situation? Both the international and the Hungarian trends show that the consumers want more and more regional (traditional and local) and organic (bio) products and this ten-dency is supported by our research as well. The most important task of the Hungarian collective marketing is to enhance the consumers’ attitude (loyalty) to the Hungarian national food products. Besides the protection of the Hungarian market, we must enhance the willingness and motiva-tion to open to the new export-markets. We must get agriculture farmers and food industry processors to volunteer in the financing of the Hun-garian collective national organization. Marketing needs more financial support within the range of possibility, and much more money should be spent on market research (information) and education (change of attitude). The most important statement of the publication is that Hungarian collective marketing can be really effective only if we manage to establish a marketing oriented system which is organized from below and which completely takes into account the needs and claims of marketing.