One more brick has fallen from the rather low wall of the legacy Marion Michael Rounds built as governor. The December newsletter from the Governor's Office of Economic Development announces the closure of the "Made in South Dakota" program. The program website will go offline December 31.
Launched in 2004 as part of Governor Rounds's 2010 Initiative, the program was intended to "show the world what South Dakota has to offer and support the state’s businesses." A GOED official, GOED decided to pull the program because the online marketplace has changed. Local businesses can much more easily set up their own websites than they could ten years ago. Google and other search engines make it easier for those businesses to get found. The Made in South Dakota website was thus seeing significantly reduced traffic. GOED thus decided to save a few dollars (I'm still trying to find that line item) by letting its contract with Paulsen Marketing expire at the end of the year.
I checked with three of the artists listed on the website. This is no thorough review of program performance, but those three artists reported no sales related to referrals from MadeinSouthDakota.com.
The closure of Made in South Dakota is an example of South Dakota government having the right idea but not committing. MadeinSouthDakota.com is (soon was! alas!) populated with mostly small, local operations, mom-and-pop/bro-and-sis retailers and artisans hoping to expand their market to tourists and online shoppers. These folks already have their roots sunk into the testy South Dakota turf. For these small but committed businesspeople, the state puts up a website and says "Go fish."
Meanwhile, the state has poured millions into sweetheart deals for big manufacturers, risked national security to solicit millions in foreign investment for big but doomed ag enterprises, and revved up the plane to take leaders from preferred industries on junkets to China.
Helping one sculptor in the Black Hills or one jewelry maker in Watertown may not make the economic splash that a giant oil refinery would. But devoting the same promotional resources to those shadetree sellers that South Dakota currently commits to the Toyota lottery would promote broader wealth and entrepreneurial power in our state.
Mike Rounds's "2010 Initiative" was nothing more than a political marketing ploy, and a pretty good one. The details of it were simply that South Dakota would have inflationary increases in a number of categories if we just elected him to a second term as governor allowing him to keep the job until 2010. The marketing genius was basically that he could take credit for doing nothing; as long as the SD economy continued along as forecast his "goals" would be met. If there were a recession that prevented the goals from being met, he could blame the recession.
That describes the Mike Rounds governorship. No goals beyond caretaking. No accomplishments besides a new governor's mansion, a new plane for the governor to fly, and 7 years of "structural deficits" filled by the federal government and pure dumb luck.
As an artist, I had a page on the site, but decided to not support the effort quickly after trying to work with the administrators, they were providing conflicting and incomplete information from the start, and seemed to be either overwhelmed, but I think more so, completely unable and unaware how to work with artists and vendors. The page itself was a dinosaur from the start, from design to search to execution, however, I think it could of been a good resource and provided an ample low cost way to promote the idea of South Dakota objects, but there just lacked a sense of commitment and vision. My thought with this effort was that the state needed to fund it well, get the right people involved, and do it right - just seemed like a halfway thought out idea with little direction, could of been great.
Speaking of ridiculous policy garbage, what's the status of Dakota Roots?
http://dakotaroots.com/documents/newsroom/10.19.07FirstYear.pdf
Cory, you hit the nail on the head with this statement "...the state puts up a website and says "Go fish." All of the state's economic development ideas seem to be like this, at least for small business.
I don't remember if the "Made in South Dakota" program existed prior to Mickelson but it was part of his economic development efforts. And, I think it was hugely effective for many years.
That said, all things have a life-cycle and this appears to have out-lived its usefulness. As you note Cory, the internet has given outlets for small businesses that didn't exist before.
Regarding the 2010 initiative, I think its supporters give it more credit for the job and income growth experienced during the Rounds years than it deserves. At the same time, I think its detractors give it too little credit.
Personally, I think the 2010 initiative:
1) Laid out some broad goals that were realistic. Success needs a road map. The initiative did that.
2) Gave focus to where localities and individual businesses could coordinate efforts. 10 disparate un-coordinated efforts, each good among themselves, are often less successful than 4 coordinated efforts, even if those efforts are less significant than the individual or sum of the 10 individual efforts.
Beati pacifici.
IP,
I wish I didn't have to look up all of your comments. Love to know Latin. Something on bucket list on which I've made no progress.
To your comment, I wish we could discuss/argue about things that matter and not try to stretch relatively minor matters into surrogates for the profound. Naïve I know.
Veritas simplex oratio est. The language of truth is simple.
According to Sir Walter Scott:
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!
http://wordinfo.info/unit/3484/page:2
Nothing against products originating or made in this state, but I never could understand the infatuation with the "South Dakota" brand in the first place. Mike Rounds way miscalculated its market potency when he went headlong into "South Dakota Certified Beef", which of course culminated in the NBP fiasco. South Dakota's principal exports are commodities and natural resources that don't particularly lend themselves to branding. This is why I think the NBP plant may yet have an afterlife as long as it reverts to a commodity-producing venture that can take cattle from any of a number of states, including South Dakota.
Right on with the 2010 initiative Troy. Hire an employee with no goals and you've got a soul drifting with the tide. It maybe wasn't responsible for everything, but I looked to that goal regularly.
More knowledgable folks than I probably have answers on the feed conversion in Nebraska and Iowa versus the sub temps in our potential feedlots John. I've not seen many successful feedlots on northern SD. 2 out of the 3 I'm aware in our neck of the woods went belly up. Cheap local feed costs can change some of that, though ethanol has changed that world.
The so-called S.D. Certified Beef program parachuted into squabbles that brewed several years ago about how we label beef raised in the USA and sold in our stores to whether or not a high-overhead beef processing plant should be built in the state. It tagged along with state discussions about value-added initiatives and the federal fight involving corporate agriculture and shipping Canadian hogs and Argentine beef to your local Hy-Vee without label the country of origin.
Rounds came up with another gimmick that sounded like he was attempting progress, but it was 100 percent window dressing that fooled no serious cattle producer.
It was typical of a Rounds response to a problem. Ignore it unless you can create the appearance of solving the problem -- and spend as little money as possible in the process.
That makes the GOED scandal more interesting. Clearly, these people had no business handling serious money to make investments on behalf of the South Dakota public. If there were safeguards to prevent abuse or people pocketing large sums of money, they were ignored and bad things happened. It speaks volumes about Rounds, his recklessness and inability (or disinterest) to oversee the people he hires.
Rick, the general comments that I got from cattle producers I did business with was that segregating the animals for the certified beef program was just too cumbersome and time-consuming to make it worth the trouble. When I was writing columns for RCJ I did a piece on how hard it was to find an outlet that sold SDCB. This was around '05. The only meat locker in the region was in, iirc, Belle--and I recall that the price was way too high. Les, the hurdles of feeding cattle in the northern Plains are indeed there--however I successfully fed cattle in Pennington County for a number of years, though I agree it wasn't as easy to get weight up as in feedlots down south. I believe some research on this was done at SDSU back then by Dr. Robbie (I forget his last name) and his results were pretty good, re, northern plains feedlots. Of course, this was before the ethanol boondoggle, which as you note changed everything. On reflection, your post from a few days ago questioning availability has some merit, and I know very little about feeding operations in and around Aberdeen. Given that we shipped cattle from eastern Pennington County to packers as far away as Greeley, western KS, eastern NE and into MN, it seemed to me that Aberdeen was well within our operating range. But then, this was pre-ethanol, so the calculations have changed.
John,
I get you are saying about the challenges to branding but it can be done. Wisconsin Cheese, Idaho potatoes, Washington Apples, Louisiana craw dads (ok that is a stretch).
But, characterizing "Made in South Dakota" as exclusively a brand effort misses the point. Before there was an internet and cost effective marketing options, MISD was really an aggregator of disparate mostly "mom & pop" products that were jointly marketed. Nobody on their own could advertise/market outside their locality but together they could. That was the real effectiveness of MISD at least in the 80's and 90's.
But, with the advent of the internet, I think value of the aggregation diminished over time until it just needed to fade away.
Regarding the SDCB, in this world of increasing diligence of where foods come from, I think there was a chance to create a specific brand that gave confidence to consumers the meat hit a certain quality standard augmenting the USDA quality ratings. And, maybe more important, to meat aficionados, meat raised on a South Dakota prairie will taste different than meat raised in Texas. People have specific taste preferences. A preference to the taste of SDbeef creates both a need and opportunity. Unfortunately, NBP didn't stick around enough to see whether or not the niche was significant enough to absorb 500,000 cattle a year or not.
That said, I always thought the feed conversion expense and/or shipping back fed cattle from southern feedlots was the biggest challenge to SDCB requiring basically an integrated marketing effort to either consumers (ala Omaha Steaks) or high-end restaurants to get a sufficient premium price to cover the feed conversion/shipping costs.
South Dakota Organic: how hard can that be?
A Madville commenter tweeted this to me this morning:
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/blogs/ge-salmon-growing-in-the-dark-in-south-dakota/
As the conversation revolves around South Dakota Certified Beef, one thing that has not been mentioned is the Amana Beef program that Hy Vee so successfully touts. It could be the same for the SD beef, leaving out the corn fed to make it US Choice. With ethanol using the corn, that seems to make the most sense. The Amana beef is not US Choice.
I ordered a few things from the Made in South Dakota site, but haven't for several years. I don't know when it got switched to having to contact the individual seller to find out the prices of their items. I didn't want to do that because if I thought an item I wanted was too expensive, I wondered if I would keep getting emails from the person, urging me to buy.
Chris: "lacked a sense of commitment and vision" aptly summarizes the Rounds administration.
Troy has an interesting point about state branding. The other states that have done so successfully have attached their brand to one product. "Made in South Dakota" was disparate products and thus perhaps wasn't going to work as well.
Troy, did MISD in the 80s and 90s help get any lasting business off the ground or create significant economic activity that wouldn't have happened otherwise? Do you recall some specific beneficiaries?
Troy, I've been doing some research on branded beef sales and find they have had about 15% market share pretty steadily over the years--though I can't tell if the branding represents cuts exclusively found in grocery meat counters or if it also applies to packaged products. Assuming the former, SDCB would crowd a market that already has at best a niche status. This is why I think Mike Rounds way overestimated its potential and why I think that NBP's only chance of making it is to go into commodity mode, and given the production hurdles you accurately list, even that is a dicey proposition. Cory, I'd say the South Dakota brand works brilliantly for one sector, tourism, mainly because our principal assets are South Dakota-specific. Beyond that, I can't see much differentiation between what SD can market that is uniquely identified with SD. I haven't been here long enough to remember the MISD effort, but it sounds more like a marketing pool arrangement than an attempt at creating a South Dakota brand.
John, let me see if I understand the marketing here. The two ways to grab market share are value and differentiation. MISD seems to have ignored value—it didn't do anything to say SD products delivered the same quality for a lower price. MISD was simply about differentiation—"Buy this stuff because it's from South Dakota, of all places!" That tack depends solely on the name recognition and branding of the state of South Dakota itself. And when South Dakota passes embarrassing legislation, or when we pay teachers least in the nation, or when ranchers fuss over a singer on a parade float, we damage that brand. To what extent could the negatives of the South Dakota brand have hampered MISD's success?
So I wonder which would be easier: boosting the South Dakota brand through better public policy and less yahoo-ism, or a more engaged marketing program that would help individual businesses identify and promote their value and differentiation (assuming the latter falls within the proper roles government)?
I agree with every single thing your Q implies. In fact, if I ever get a chance to go one on one with the Governor, I intend to ask him what he thinks the general reaction among prospective entrepeneurs considering moving themselves and their businesses into the state is to the news that we pay our teachers such abysmally low salaries. My pre-SD milieus were L.A. and Chicago, and I can tell you the first thing that would come to my mind from those vantage points is that this state must be populated by a bunch of hicks.
With all the free publicity and ongoing investigations, lets take advantage of the brand we curry.
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"South Dakota Pork"
.
No doubt on who foots the bill for this one trick pony.
"South Dakota Good".
"South Dakota: the Other White Meat."
"South Dakota Ethics-Free."