Ben Lazzaro leads the Australian Made Campaign as the Chief Executive Officer which is a Not for Profit organisation on a mission to administer and promote the Country of Origin of Australian Made products. The Australian Made symbol is a highly recognised and trusted symbol underpinned by a strong criteria of credentials to ensure that this trust lives on.
TS: Tell us a little bit more about your role, and about Australian Made. Holistically, what is the mission of Australian Made?
BL: Australian Made Campaign Limited (AMCL) is a not-for-profit organisation that works in the commercial sector. We're not a government agency and we go to great lengths to make that clear. Essentially, our job is to administer and promote that famous green and gold kangaroo logo, what's called a Country of Origin certification trademark. Essentially, it's a trademark that is underpinned by a set of rules and criteria that governments use. So in short, if a product carries the Australian Made logo, it means our organisation and our compliance team have reviewed and assessed that product and are satisfied it meets the requirements to legally make an Australian Made claim.
The best way to demonstrate is using a cake as an example. In theory you can import every ingredient into Australia - the flour, the eggs, the milk - and then make that cake here in Australia. The cake can then legally be described as Australian Made, because the final product has been substantially transformed here in Australia. That’s an extreme example, but what you find more often than not, is that the Australian Made products are made from a mixture of imported and local components and ingredients or a very high percentage content of Australian ingredients.
What we then try to do on top of that is add additional value to the brands that have products licenced, such as creating new channels to market. So, for example, we've got relationships with e-commerce platforms, like an Australian Made store on eBay. We facilitate licenced products, should the brands wish to be on that platform to engage with that channel to market.
TS: How have you seen Australian Made businesses last year and this year creating more value in the world? And how has the logo substantiated that and created value?
BL: The logo in itself is a very powerful sales and marketing tool. It's been around since 1986 after it was introduced by the Federal Government at the time. Since 1999, it's been administered by our organisation, with ownership transferred to us.
One of its key strengths is its market capital. It is recognised by 99 per cent of Australians and - possibly even more importantly - trusted by 92 per cent of Australians. Those are figures any brand would kill for. The logo delivers instant credibility to the products that carry it. There are all sorts of reasons why people buy products or not, so the Australian Made logo makes the Australian connection instantly and clearly.
During last year, and particularly as Covid-19 was impacting everyone here in Australia, we saw that domestically the logo received an enormous amount of attention. Businesses were falling over themselves in some way to demonstrate their Australian credentials to buyers, because there was a very pro-Australian sentiment from around May 2020 onwards. It became very clear to Australians that we perhaps had an imbalance between our locally made products and imported products and that it was a good time to shift that needle back towards buying local.
That's also evidenced by the fact that applications to use the Australian Made logo increased by around 400 per cent in May through to September. So we are one of these lucky businesses that actually had to take on additional staff to deal with the increased workload and that's not lost on us because we understand many businesses went through very difficult times and continue to do so.
We were actually run off our feet, which is a wonderful problem to have and we saw an appetite to demonstrate being Australian really growing.
TS: How are you seeing Australian companies bridge that gap between the physical and digital aspects of organisations to create growth in their overall businesses?
BL: From our point of view, we see a very accelerated movement online and to social media given what's happened. I think on self reflection, we all probably look at our online purchases and question if we really needed all that stuff we bought during the lockdown period when we got very friendly with the delivery guys, as many Australians did! But I think from our perspective, there is an inherent link between making stuff and selling it. To sell it you generally need to do that directly, or through a retailer or a wholesaler. So we're seeing that movement online accelerate even more, particularly within the small-business sector, because there are all these wonderful tools and platforms that you can self manage to some degree.
A lot of our licensees are leveraging Australian Made digital channels more than ever. So we have half a million on our social-media platform who are very engaged and very keen to find products. We're seeing our website visitation - which has a product directory of all licenced products - people are coming to that to identify Aussie products.
As I said before, we are partnering with a number of e-commerce platforms that are selling Aussie products online, including eBay Australia and another one called Remarkable Humans. We're seeing a lot of those platforms emerge, and it'll be interesting to see how they track because ultimately, the power is in the hands of the consumers.
Interested in learning more? Listen to Ben Lazzaro's complete interview on the TradeSquare podcast ,TSQ, here.
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