The campaign promotes strawberry eating as a patriotic act supporting growers. It pushes the consumption of smashed or cut-up strawberries by sharing recipes, ideas and photos.
Separately the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has also called for consumers to start consuming cut-up strawberries to help keep growers in business.
Price told Rural News the strawberry growers in Australia are in crisis as consumers are wary about buying them.
“This is an absolutely fantastic solution to pull out the patriotism and get everyone to support buying Australian strawberries,” she says.
“There is nothing wrong with it. They are saying ‘cut them up or smash them’ via #smashastrawb. I would hope if anything like that happened here we could do something the same.
“It has set the bar quite high,” she says, in terms of good public relations strategy.
Price says food sabotage has happened before and will happen again.
“It is something we need to be prepared for and pulling a trick like that out of the hat is good thinking by the Australians. I would hope that we could emulate them if we ever had to but let’s hope we don’t.”
She believes public sympathy would be with farmers because it is not their fault.
“Sabotage has been visited on them by others and it looks like there have been copycats. The best way to counter that is to pull out that sympathy for the farmers and pull out the patriotism to buy Australian strawberries.”
Price also says it was a major coup to get the Australian Prime Minister to come out in support.
“All sorts of celebrities have been getting behind it now too. You don’t know whether that has been driven by a PR campaign or they have just got on the wagon,” Price explains. “Probably it was started as a campaign asking the celebrities or asking the Prime Minister to be involved and the others have wanted to be part of it too because it is such a positive promotion.”
Price believes the New Zealand food and the public relations industries are prepared for such situations.
“Most of the food companies I have ever worked for have all had a crisis public relations plan. I don’t know that it has gone as far as #smashastrawb, but now that we have seen that work well it is probably something we could add to -- pulling out the support for the New Zealand grower or farmer or whomever.
“All the food companies will have a crisis plan because there are a lot of things that can happen to food.”
She adds that social and digital media are crucial.
