Posts Tagged ‘Cycleway’

Value v volume – lessons for Kiwi farmers and tourism and the danger of cr@pping over a precious advantage

One of BigCake’s big ideas for New Zealand’s future is that our farmers need to get out of the volume game.

We’ve been pretty good at it in the past particularly in dairying, but we’re soon going to get slaughtered by the likes of Uruguay and Chile.

Our future is in value – less is more by making the most of our clean green image which the South American companies haven’t a hope of emulating, probably ever.

The danger is that we’ll sh!t all over this advantage and we’ll be forced to play the South Americans in the volume game.

This value v volume argument perhaps also applies to tourism.

BigCake knows Tourism NZ has been chasing the world’s wealthy tourists, but Julian Roberston, American billionaire (437th on the Forbes billionaires list), NewZealand enthusiast and part-time resident, says New Zealand has a “backpacker mentality”.

That is a focus on volume rather than value.

Roberston tells The Dominion Post in an interview published today that in many ways the Kiwi tourism industry is “not very well run.

“…what I’m trying to tell [PM] John Key and these people is that my wife could spend more in an hour than a backpacker would spend in three months.

“I think New Zealand was put on this earth as the greatest tourist destination there is.”

BTW – Robertson also supports the national cycleway proposal which of course BigCake is a big backer of.