03/16/05 The Asian rounds for NW Cherries, Pt.2

The first stop in Northwest Cherries' annual trek to Asian nations is a visit to a new market & South Korea. Usually in new markets, the strategy is to develop distribution first and then grow marketing strategies. But B.J. Thurlby of Northwest Cherries says there are some unique marketing opportunities available to promote and increase consumer purchases of cherries. And that includes the world wide web. THURLBY: Koreans buy heavily on the internet. Koreans refer to the internet and use their internet as a medium for information even more so than we do here in the United States. But for South Korean consumers, a more popular medium is home shopping networks. THURLBY: Koreans buy a tremendous amount of products off of their television. So we're looking at ways there that we can do some unique stuff with cherries, maybe not sell our cherries so much through their home shopping networks, but have a promotional event tied into the home shopping networks where we use cherries as kind of a tag-on primer that if someone were to buy "x" product, and we hoping to associate ourselves with some great products over there, they would get a box of cherries, just to kind of kick off without saying "Hey, buy the cherries over the internet". The rest of the Northwest Cherries delegations' Asian visit includes stops in existing markets, and planning for an annual promotion. Details on that are discussed in our next program.