CONTENTS

Economic Impacts of National Generic Dairy Advertising

The Impact of Generic Fluid Milk Advertising on Whole, Lowfat, and Skim Milk Demand

Generic Advertising Wearout: The Case of the NYC Fluid Milk Campaign

Manager's Viewpoint

Editor's Notes

Director’s Corner

Selected Reading

Next Meeting

NEC-63 2002 Next Meeting Date xx-yy, 2002 Albuquerque, New Mexico Title

Manager's Viewpoint

by Cynthia Carson, General Manager
George Harmon, Group Executive Strategic Information
Dairy Management Incorporated

Program evaluation is a cornerstone of the national dairy promotion check-off program. In fact, the authors of the 1983 legislation which created the National Dairy Promotion and Research Board (NDPRB) had the foresight to make an annual independent analysis of program impact mandatory.

Dairy farmers invest 15 cents per hundredweight of milk produced to fund their promotion check-off program. The mission of the program is to maintain and expand domestic and foreign markets and uses for dairy products produced in the United States.

Our bottom-line evaluation criterion gets right at the heart of the mission. Are we expanding markets and uses of dairy foods?

Dairy farmers receive an annual report from USDA charting progress against our mission. It’s similar to a corporation’s annual report describing its progress against the bottom line to its shareholders.

USDA’s most recent report of that independent analysis to Congress detailed sales statistics for 1994 as well as running statistics since the board’s inception 11 years ago. For 1994, the report attributed a 4.7 percent increase in fluid milk sales and a 2.4 percent increase in in-home usage of natural and processed cheese to the dairy promotion check-off program.

Assessing bottom-line results is only one aspect of evaluation. Evaluation plays other very important roles in managing to a bottom line objective. Evaluation is an important tool in establishing priorities, setting goals, developing strategies to achieve goals, and developing programs to successfully deliver the strategies. Evaluation then tells us how well we did the things we planned and contributes to the knowledge we need to improve our programs.

We at Dairy Management Incorporated (DMI) are working hard to ensure that we are using evaluation tools to help us make the smartest choices at all levels of decision making. Historically, the NDPRB and the United Dairy Industry Association have used evaluation tools both to help determine advertising strategies and to measure advertising effectiveness. Recently, under the management of DMI, we have delved deeper into measuring the effectiveness of all our efforts by establishing explicit goals and measurements for not just advertising, but all programs. To maximize the effectiveness of national producer promotion dollars with those from the states and regions, it is important for all partners to understand what is working. We have worked together to establish common goals, determine responsibilities, and establish measurements to improve our effectiveness. By being disciplined to assure that each program has well-defined objectives that have specific measurable expectations (including the means to measure), are achievable and related to the strategy or other goals, and are time bound, we are able to assess benefits and cost effectiveness of each program and then later evaluate to determine what worked and what we can improve in the future.

Planning and evaluation go hand in hand and are essential tools that we are applying to continuously improve our effectiveness. Continuing to push ourselves to validate the effectiveness of our programs is a proactive strategy for both improving our performance and being accountable to our owners.