Nolan pitchin' beef to Nipponese
An alert Brazosport News reader informed us over the weekend that the most famous son of Brazoria County, Texas, is the centerpiece of an ad campaign in Japan to get those people to start eating American cows again.
Nolan Ryan hasn't lived in Alvin for awhile now, but they still claim him, keeping a bird poop-splattered statue of the baseball pitcher out in front of City Hall that we once campaigned to get cleaned up (and which did get cleaned up thanks to Bill Crider, the Bard of Alvin.)
Anyhow, Nolan still draws a lotta water in Brazoria County, where a portion of TX Hwy 288 was named the Nolan Ryan Expressway (though no one ever calls it that in everyday conversation), and he does in Japan, too, cause they love baseball.
Trouble is, mad cow disease caused the Japanese government to ban US beef imports for a time, and when the ban was lifted, the customers never really came back, reports The Wall Street Journal.
So, who ya gonna call?
...to revive the Japanese appetite for U.S. beef, the association figured it also had to connect directly with customers. Mr. Ryan, who now raises cattle in Texas and is well-known in baseball-crazed Japan, seemed like the perfect spokesman. So the federation developed its elaborate "Beef makes you strong!" ("Beef de genki!") campaign starring Mr. Ryan and featuring more than 2,000 different beef-related promotions over a three-month period.
Developed in-house, the campaign includes advertisements in magazines and newspapers that give Mr. Ryan's and other famous athletes' favorite red-meat recipes. A sweepstakes at more than 40 retailers gives customers who buy American beef the chance to enter to win prizes such as autographed baseballs and barbecue pits. Photos of Mr. Ryan at his ranch in Texas hang in the beef aisles at major grocery stores, including Seiyu Ltd., the Japanese subsidiary of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Japan's third-largest grocery store chain by sales.
The promotion also included focus groups at which Mr. Ryan told customers how the beef ban had affected his family ranch, which produces about 1,900 calves a year and has seen prices fall due to a decrease in demand. Mr. Ryan, known for his record-breaking fastball, retired from Major League Baseball in 1993 and is now president of the American Breeds Coalition, an organization that promotes U.S. cattle.
Does anyone ever see Nolan around Alvin any more? Do tell.
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3 comments:
Pidgeons. AKA, Rock Doves.
You think, when you go dove hunting, a statue would be better to put up than those little fake doves?
Or, maybe you could just paint yourself all white and stand really, really still...
jd
I didn't see Nolan around much even when he lived here. I haven't seen him in a long time.
Ni Hao! Kannichi Wa!
Looks like us “slant eyes” are outpacing the “long noses” in selling export ethnic foods to each other, see
Chronicle article.
The Houston food inspection team needs to rapidly come up to speed if they can’t distinguish contamination from strong fishy smell, yukky surface color on Nigerian dried bats, green/black colored chocolate dried grasshoppers, etc.
What a lot of people don’t know is that the USA “long noses” are one of the largest importers to Asia of culturally “rejected” animal parts like chicken feet and other parts termed as “guts” and undesirable by-products that used to go for animal feed or fertilizer.
If Ryan and the Texas beef industry wants to really break the high end Kannichi Wa market, then it’s got to be done with cultural and traditional finesse with Kobe beef raised and feedlot fed Kobe style.
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