Branded Goods Association: serving brands and quality for 15 years

BGA’s 15th anniversary meeting took place in the famous Lotz room of the Párizsi Department Store on Andrássy Boulevard, on 15 December 2010. In his opening speech President Tamás Ács highlighted the importance of continuity in brand build-ing both in business and lobbying, stating that BGA’s goal remained the same for 15 years: to create for brands an environment of fair and vigorous competition, fostering innovation and guaranteeing maximum value to consumers now and for generations to come. In his keynote speech, Dr Miklós Juhász, President of the Hungarian Competition Authority (GVH) said he sees BGA as an important partner with its membership reaching millions of consumers every day. He added that GVH intends to make its operation more transparent and customer-friendly, in return counting more on the law-abiding and ethical behaviour of the enterprises. The next part of the meeting was dedicated to evoking the past 15 years of BGA. Stephan Skopp, the association’s first president said they had to start everything from scratch: building the organisational structure, establishing political and regulatory liaises, and defining the common goals and projects. Ildikó Fazekas, SecGen of the Advertising Self-regulatory Body (ÖRT) highlighted it was BGA that helped establish ÖRT to create a flexible, cheap and efficient system for marketing self-regulation. Tibor Seres, BGA’s second president claimed the most important objective was always to defend the interests of both the members and the entire FMCG-industry. Upon having established the internal structure and the external relations, BGA quickly turned to efficiently tackling market anomalies and business conflicts. SecGen Zoltán Fekete demonstrated this by presenting success stories of BGA managing to persuade retailers to stop or change their marketing campaigns promoting private labels in a legally or ethically questionable way. Defense of industry interests happened on the regulatory scene as well as BGA commented or shaped successfully all relevant regulations in the last 15 years.It was in the past two years that BGA started to invest more and more in consumer networking eg. by signing cooperation agreements with both the state and the civil consumer organizations. Early 2011, BGA will approve the Agenda 2015, its strategic plan for the next period.