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ONE-ON-ONE
Ben Lazzaro is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Made Campaign Limited. He spoke to William Poole. AMT: Tell us firstly about the Australian Made Campaign and its objectives. Ben Lazzaro: The Aussie Made Campaign’s remit is to administer and promote the famous Australian Made, Australian Grown logo, the green and gold kangaroo. That’s everything from compliance, to ensure that products that carry the logo comply with the criteria, through to promoting the brand and all the products that carry the logo. Essentially we’re running what’s called a country of origin certification trademark. It’s the only one in Australia. The logo itself has been around since 1986. Our organisation was established in 1999 by our governing members, which are the Australian Chamber of Commerce, the state and territory chambers of commerce, as well as the National Farmers Federation. So we have links into the business community and to the agricultural sector. Being a certification trademark, the Australian Made brand is governed by a set of criteria that products need to meet in order to ensure compliance. And that’s a big part of what we do. We have a compliance team that ensures the products that apply to use the logo meet those criteria based on Australian consumer law. This is where your average consumer would probably just glaze over, which would be quite right, because you don’t want to know how a watch works, you just want to know the time, and that’s what this brand does to some extent. When a consumer or business sees this product, they know that a third party has done the appropriate checks to ensure that it meets the Australian Made criteria set out in Australian consumer law. That means it satisfies what’s called a substantial transformation test, which essentially means the finished product is new in identity and in essential character to that of its imported or potentially imported input components. A very simple example is you can make a cake out of five ingredients that are all imported, but you turn those imported ingredients into a cake. That cake has been determined to be substantively transformed and therefore can be sold as an Australian-made cake. That is a very simplified version obviously, and with AMT’s audience it becomes more and more complicated and detailed with some of the manufacturing processes that our team would deal with. But that’s essentially the way we try to explain it. Another part of our job is policing. We make sure we maintain the integrity of the Australian Made logo. We run our own auditing processes. The best policeman is the competitor, so a lot of the time if someone’s misusing the logo, then it will be another logo user or a competitor, or a very eagle-eyed consumer that will report misuse. We follow up on every single issue that’s brought to us, and we go out and do our own checks as well.
AMT AUG/SEP 2020
So that’s a big part of what we do, which is also testament to why the logo enjoys a wonderful reputation, which we get (market research company) Roy Morgan to measure regularly. The Australian Made logo is recognised by 99% of Australians and trusted by 88%. And that second one is the one that we were most proud of, because our job is to make sure this logo makes the Australian connection instantly and clearly. That’s its prime job, that’s its role. We want to make sure that it makes the Aussie connection, it’s recognised, and most importantly it’s trusted, in that the products that carry the brand are indeed Australian. It evokes other attributes, of course; being Australian is positive in most contexts. And recently we did some more research and 84% of consumers associate the brand with jobs. And in the current environment with COVID-19, these things have never been more important, particularly jobs. Buying Aussie, there’s a direct correlation there with jobs. AMT: And how much clout does the Australian Made logo have internationally? For companies that are exporting, how much value is derived from the fact that those products are made in Australia? BL: Australia is viewed very positively overseas. In Asia, for example, we have a wonderful reputation for our clean green environment, our high standard of manufacturing; we’re known for quality, and the logo conveys a lot of those attributes. We did some research in China, and for many years now, we’ve been hearing about the 300 million middle-class in China who have an appetite for Aussie products, and of course who have the disposable income to buy them. When we did some research in China back in 2017, we found that 70% of shoppers that fell into that middle-class category knew that the brand was Australian – with products that carried our logo they made the Australian connection. So our brand, and Brand Australia in general, are certainly very highly regarded in that market. Now let’s not forget the US are also there, Europe’s there, all the other countries are there trying to sell products there as well, but there is absolutely opportunity overseas. I should point out we’re a not-for-profit organisation funded by licence fees. However AMCL recently secured a $5m Federal Government grant to promote the famous Australian Made logo in key export markets, as well as establishing trade mark registrations in the United Kingdom, the European Union and Canada. That’s become increasingly difficult in recent times of course, but there’s a lot of planning going on right now. So what you’ll see is a lot of online activations in the first instance. And over the next three years, we’re aiming to provide Australia Made logo users with more opportunities to promote Aussie products in export markets.
