One of North Korea’s most prominent beverage producers these days released a three-minute video touting the health benefits and “superior satisfactory” of its most popular products.
In an advertisement released via externally-focused media outlet the DPRK Today on Tuesday, the Pyongyang-primarily based O-il General Health Drinks Factory claims to make the “utmost efforts to ensure the outstanding great of soft beverages.”
“Compete with the World! Challenge the World! Keep Ahead of the World! Break Through the Cutting Edge!” a slogan at the beginning of the video says.
The company — whose name translates as “May 1st General Health Drinks Factory” — is a “comprehensive beverage manufacturing base that puts pinnacle priority on the health of humans,” it keeps.
“Our manufacturing facility manufactures nearly all its products with herbal substances,” the marketing says, pointing to its ice cream, reportedly made with “natural fruit juices, nutrients, nutritional dietary supplements,” as an example.
This “shape of marketing is likewise first-rate insofar as it’s miles surely designed to goal the domestic market,” Peter Ward, an author, and researcher at the North Korean economy and NK Pro contributing analyst, stated.
“Why might a North Korean meals manufacturer prepare what’s with the aid of North Korean requirements one of these slick ads unless a great marketplace for such products existed, and there was potential opposition for this market?” he stated.
“Perhaps this competition is ordinarily imported, and maybe that is a tribulation run for a future export approach. Nonetheless, from what we know, middle-class Pyongyangites are more and more able to eat such merchandise, and such advertising and marketing might also communicate to authentic and intensifying home opposition for their ‘food dollar.’”
SPORTS MARKETING
In the advert, the O-il General Health Drinks Factory defined its energy drink as a popular product among athletes, showing soccer players taking part in the product simultaneously as education.
“The energy-revitalizing drink gains massive reputation not best amongst athletes and most of the people,” it stated, promising that users can “complement minerals, relieve strain, recover from fatigue, and enhance the immune function.”
The electricity drink, marketing copy reads, allows clients to “maximize their physical ability once they do the in-depth workout, tough labor, and excessive-level of intellectual exertions and recover from fatigue and strain.”
This advertising approach ties into the North Korean government’s long-standing emphasis on building a “sports energy,” Ward, the North Korean economic system watcher, said.
“Designed to appeal to a burgeoning domestic marketplace of better-stop consumers who can manage to pay for and are interested in fitness meals merchandise, the business enterprise puts sports activities the front and center in its advertising strategy,” he referred to.
“Given the North Korean authorities’ strong emphasis on sports activities-based patriotism and the overall popularity of sports within the country, it seems like a sensible move, politically and commercially.”
The Choson Sinbo, a Tokyo-based pro-Pyongyang outlet, in May mentioned that one of the most “vital roles of the manufacturing facility is to increase, manufacture, and supply beverage to enhance the athletic capabilities of sports gamers,” pronouncing that footballers often make “active use of the product.”
“Athletes actively use the beverage to improve their athletic competencies if we take a look at global traits,” Roh Tae Hyon, a researcher on the corporation’s product improvement crew, instructed the hole.
“This becomes lacking in our usa,” he continued. “To keep in advance of the arena, drinks have to aim to meet global-class standards additionally.”
Although North Korean kingdom media is yet to verify the hyperlink, the agency’s branding and name recommend it be commercially linked to Pyongyang’s May Day Stadium, which is the most important in the international and a request web page of mass games performances.
FUNCTIONAL BEVERAGE AIMED AT WOMEN, CHILDREN
The advert also touts the sensible blessings of the business enterprise’s beverages, promising to “broaden and produce greater purposeful health drinks that become the face of the manufacturing facility and help people improve their health” and reporting that the wide variety of those varieties of merchandise has extended day by day.
In one instance, the video promotes a diet complement milk containing Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), hyaluronic acid, and collagen aimed at helping ladies “look more youthful and more lovely.”