Meat & Livestock Australia is utilising multicultural media to encourage Australia’s Chinese community to eat more beef in a first of the kind campaign, B&T can reveal.
The representative body for Australia’s red meat and livestock industry has undertaken a study to understand the protein preferences of different ethnic communities, and has begun a campaign to get on the plates of Australia’s Chinese community.
Working in partnership with Omnicom’s multicultural marketing agency Identity Communications, Multicultural Outdoor and content creators, the MLA hosted a chefs table event in which a celebrity chef prepared Chinese beef dishes for six Chinese KOLs (key opinion leaders) who shared the content to their audiences on RedBook, WeChat, Weibo and other Chinese social media platforms (see below).
The MLA then held public tastings at Chinese supermarkets in Sydney and Melbourne, backed by advertising and call to actions through Multicultural Outdoor’s digital screen network in Chinese supermarkets.
MLA’s group manager of branding and content Jeffrey Ng told B&T that research shows that although migrant communities quickly adopt Australian cultural conventions in fashion and music, they often retain the food preferences from their motherland.
As Australia’s demographics evolve, with the majority of population growth coming from countries like China and India, this presents a challenge for meat producers to sell products like beef and lamb to burgeoning new migrant communities.
A targeted, nuanced approach
Although the MLA’s annual summer lamb ad has broad reach and mainstream exposure, a more nuanced and targeted approach is required to be effective to migrant communities.
“The challenge is to grow the level of adoption of local proteins into the cuisines of new Australians. So this was actually an exercise in trying to target different ethnicities for both beef and lamb,” Ng said.
MLA research found that Australia’s Chinese community enjoy eating beef even though it is not a typical protein used in their food culture (Mongolian Beef is not a traditional Chinese or Mongolian dish).
“This whole idea was conceived to provide inspiration around how beef can actually be used just as effectively as pork or chicken in Chinese Australians existing repertoire of cooking techniques and recipes,” he said.
“We have targeted beef for Northern Asians because of just the sheer size of opportunity in that area…the South Asian community is certainly a lamb and goat opportunity.
“We aren’t going up against seasonal high periods like Christmas hams, what we have found is that you want to go after the everyday consumer environment, basically 52 weeks of the year.
Ng said the campaign could provide a blueprint for how the MLA grows protein sales to other immigrant communities.
“We’ve identified where the population growth is coming from and understand that they have different barriers to different cooking techniques,” he said.
“There’s no real issue on introducing different proteins from an acceptance point of view, but the way in which we need to reach and talk to the core community needs to be more relevant to their cultures.”
The long game
Identity Communications worked closely with the MLA to target first generation Chinese and the student community, and then “leverage the power of community and the power of recommendations from within the community”, according to managing director Santosh Murthy (pictured above, second left).
“One of the great things MLA has done in this space is it is a long-term conversation, it’s a serious conversation and it’s not just a flash in the wok, if you like,” Murthy said.
“This is community led and the conversation is continuing as we have had Chinese consumers try these recipes at home.”
The early results are promising. Almost half of the people who have seen the Chinese beef recipes advertised are either likely or very likely to try them at home, Murthy added.
Multicultural Outdoor founder and CEO Ronnie Navani (pictured above, far right) told B&T the integration of digital screens for awareness, followed by physical sampling of MLA recipes for consideration and trial helped amplify the campaign’s impact.
“By leveraging Multicultural Outdoor’s Chinese network (see below), we were able to connect authentically with Chinese audiences in environments they trust and engage with daily. Pairing that communication with a sensory experience like premium beef sampling creates a powerful bridge between message and moment—driving both awareness and appetite.”
