Branding Guide
The practical guide for branding regional products
The Lifescape Branding Guide is a step by step guide for marketing regional products that are produces while managing the regional landscape.
It began with the South Downs Lamb Company, which organised a local network of farmers, butchers and supermarkets to sell the lamb and mutton of the sheep that grazed the South Downs chalky grasslands. In the whole process the Lamb Company looked at the quality of the meat, the traceability of the products, the animal welfare and the environmental effects of the grazing sheep flocks. With the proper marketing the company succeeded in realizing added value for the farmers, so the traditional sheep grazing of the Downs became economical viable.
The marketing of the South Down lamb became the leading example for the Lifescape partners for selling products not only to finance nature and landscape management but also to show the local public what the value is of that nature and landscape. In Germany the MainÄppelhaus Lohrberg in the region of Frankfurt am Main for instance sells twenty varieties of apples and a traditionally made green apple sauce to support the preservation and maintenance of the small scale and labour-intensive standard tree orchards. And in the region of Audomarois near Calais the Parc Naturel Régional des Caps et Marais d’Opale stimulates they sell by-products of the maintenance of the difficult to maintain hedgerows that are particular to the local landscape. Because of the many experiences, the Lifescape partners have chosen to combine these in a Branding Guide, so these can also be used by other people and organisations in Europe who deal with the same issues.
In the Branding Guide a step by step approach to marketing the landscape is offered. You can either follow this and read in depth what problems and possibilities there are, or you can follow the pointy checklist with questions a new practitioner in marketing the landscape has to pose itself. ’The ambition must be high’, states Neil Hill of the South Downs Lamb Company. ’In order for your success to be maintained you must produce a consistently better product than your competitors and it must be clearly differentiated, identified and promoted.’
