Further to yesterday’s post about chooks being the favourite pet in Australia, I thought I’d share an excellent piece of marketing by Sunny Queen Farms.

Sunny Queen produces free-range eggs. There has been much negative publicity over the last decade about the treatment of chooks (battery hens for example) and what in fact constitutes a free-range chook.

So to prove their chooks were free-range, they invented a Chook Tracker. Every home should have one. The tracker records the movement and distance travelled by the chook being tracked, including an estimate of the number of steps the chook takes during a day.

The tracker was originally designed to help the chook farmer learn more about chook behaviour, so he could improve living areas for the chooks. But now the tracker is an excellent marketing tool.

On the Sunny Queen Farm website you can track the movement of their chooks – the distance walked each day, along with the route taken. Thousands of people have “liked” the site and you can use social media to promote the site on the farm’s (or is that chooks’) behalf?

It’s a brilliant product demonstration and it proves their chooks are free-range and healthy. My good wife started buying their eggs after seeing this site, as she trusted the brand more in terms of the way they treat their chooks.

Here’s the site – http://www.sunnyqueen.com.au/chooktracker/ go visit and be sure to watch the Eggumetary until the end:

And here’s the proposition on the site:

“Our Free Range hens are living a happy life, roaming around freely all day, eating nutritious food and sleeping safely in their barns at night. That’s why they lay such rich, golden-yolked eggs.”

Here’s a screen shot of the site on a wet day. The language is lovely. David Ogilvy said all great ads contained “charm” and this site has it in spades.

Nothing sells better than a good product demonstration. And I’m sure you’ll never see a better one to demonstrate that a producer’s chooks are not caged.

Of course the term “free range eggs” means different things to different people and different cultures. A local hobby farm not far from my golf course bred chooks and sold eggs from an honesty box. For those who don’t know, it means the eggs are stored in a shed on the side of the road and the farmer trusts the customer to leave the correct amount of money when they take their eggs.

Unfortunately he had to change his sign. Apparently a bunch on non-English speaking migrants who recently moved to the area, thought the sign read “free range eggs” – that is, the range eggs were free to anyone who wanted them. It’s no wonder they thought their new country was wonderful.

Maybe he should make an egg tracker to track where the eggs go, not just the chooks?