Hoping to jumpstart years of lagging milk sales, a multinational packaging company's offices in the Slovak and Czech Republics have combined forces and launched an extensive media campaign to raise the public's awareness of this dairy product.
At a press conference in Bratislava on April 30, Jonny Olsson, managing director of the Swedish company Tetra Pak Grafobal's Slovak office, said "the milk message has disappeared" over the last several years, as the public is bombarded with trendy advertisements pitching other drinks.
"We want to get people to try milk again," Olsson said. "There are so many messages out there that people have forgotten about milk." Olsson said that milk's nutritional value should make it more attractive than more popular items such as soft drinks.
However, Olsson did say that Slovaks had not come to terms with the rapid increase in milk prices after 1989, when a liter of milk rose from approximately 2 Sk to 13-15 Sk today. Also in that time, milk consumption in Slovakia has halved, Olsson said, using statistics Tetra Pak Grafobal compiled from surveys and focus group polling. "Our research shows that people want to buy milk, but they're hearing about so many other products that they're forgetting about it." Slovaks on average consume about 70 liters of milk annually, Olsson said.
The media campaign is centered on a 7 million Sk TV and radio advertising buy, Olsson said, to be complemented by 1 million Sk in print advertising buys. The campaign kicked off in mid-April and will run in its first phase through the end of May, while the second phase will be launched in September, deliberately timed to target families sending their children back to school. The Slovak public relations firm ProPublicum is managing the Slovak end of the media campaign.
According to Olsson, Tetra Pak's operations in the Slovak and Czech Republics had 2 billion Sk in turnover in 1996, around a 25 percent increase over 1995. Tetra Pak Slovakia sold 165 million packages on the Slovak market last year, Olsson added.
