A North American Matariki celebration and the economics of authenticity

Thursday, 16 July 2026

Mike “MOD” O’Donnell is a professional investor, businessman and company director. Currently he is NZTE’s regional trade director for North America. The opinions in this column are his own.

OPINION: As I write this week's column, I've just returned from the annual Kiwis in LA Matariki pot luck lunch at Clover Park near Venice Beach. It was a wonderfully eclectic gathering. Families, students, diplomats, surfers, business people and the occasional homesick Wellingtonian came together over shared food to reflect on the year that's been and the one still to come.

Back home, our family's Matariki tradition is less organised. We head out to Breaker Bay on Wellington's south coast, watch the sun disappear behind Te Wai Pounamu and, if Wellington's southerly isn't trying to remove the skin from our faces, enjoy a bottle of Garage Project Smoked Porter beside a driftwood fire. It isn't particularly sophisticated, but after a couple of porters it certainly feels reflective.

Like Christmas, everyone celebrates Matariki a little differently. But at its heart it remains about the same things: connection, gratitude, remembrance and optimism. Those values sound terribly worthy until you realise they are also pretty useful in business.

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be involved in a Matariki food and beverage showcase in Vancouver. The heavy lifting was done by our Canada team who managed to persuade a room full of busy buyers, distributors, retailers and chefs that spending an evening eating New Zealand food was a better use of their time than the hundred other things competing for their attention.

Read more:

• Mountain lions and other rough sleepers in the City of Angels

• How New Zealand hopped to it – and gave Americans a kick in the palate

• Solid, reliable and a key to our energy future - this is geothermal’s time to shine

The timing helped too. With Fifa activity bringing visitors into the city, a few friends from New Zealand Football were able to join the mix, alongside local First Nations contacts - a fitting connection given Canada’s National Indigenous Peoples Day fell in the same period

What impressed me wasn't simply that it was well run. It was the restraint.

There was no attempt to turn Matariki into a marketing gimmick or wrap exporters in Māori imagery because it looked attractive on a brochure. Instead, Matariki became the reason people gathered. It provided context rather than decoration. The commercial objective remained refreshingly uncomplicated: introduce good companies, serve good food and start good conversations.

That distinction matters.

There has been plenty of debate in New Zealand about businesses using Matariki as another excuse for a sale. Discount weekends, “Matariki specials” and superficial Māori branding have all attracted criticism, and rightly so. People have an uncanny ability to spot the difference between authenticity and opportunism. One builds trust. The other usually ends with someone in the marketing department wondering why social media has suddenly become such an unfriendly place.

The Vancouver event showed me what doing it well looks like.

It also reinforced something I've come to appreciate after nearly a year living in North America. Provenance matters. A lot.

Americans and Canadians are endlessly fascinated by where things come from. Not just products, but people, towns, recipes and family businesses. They want to know the back story. Whether it's Napa Cabernet, Kentucky bourbon, Vermont maple syrup or Idaho potatoes, the story is often every bit as important as the product itself. More importantly, they're prepared to pay for it.

That should be encouraging for Kiwi exporters because provenance is one of our greatest competitive advantages.

A rack of New Zealand lamb isn't just another cut of meat. A jar of mānuka honey from D'Urville Island isn't simply another sweetener. They carry with them the landscapes they came from, the people who produced them and the values that shaped them. Increasingly, that's what premium markets are buying.

That's where Matariki fits. It isn't another marketing campaign, nor should it become one. It is part of the provenance of modern New Zealand. It helps explain who we are, how we see the world and why our products carry a character that competitors can't easily copy.

The team also understood another commercial truth: timing often matters more than budget.

Vancouver was full of international visitors because of Fifa activity. Rather than compete with it, they simply harnessed it. Buyers who may never have attended a conventional trade event found themselves around a dinner table enjoying New Zealand food, hearing New Zealand stories and making connections that would have been almost impossible to manufacture in a boardroom.

On paper, the supporting companies had little in common beyond sharing the same country of origin.

Around the dinner table, they became New Zealand, helped a lot by by Te Tini a Maui, the local Vancouver kapa haka group who performed during the evening.

The event generated new leads and strengthened existing relationships. But I suspect its longer-term value will prove harder to measure. Every buyer who walked out of that room left knowing a little more about New Zealand than when they arrived. That's not a bad outcome from an evening's work.

For me, that's the lesson.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to invent competitive advantage. We invest in technology, branding, logistics and marketing, all of which matter enormously. Yet some of our greatest advantages were already sitting here. They simply needed recognising.

Respecting Matariki and using it to build commercial relationships are not competing ideas. Done badly, Matariki becomes a marketing prop and deserves every criticism it receives. Done well, it becomes part of the story that gives New Zealand products depth, authenticity and value.

The things that endure in business are often the things that can't be manufactured. They are grounded in place, earned over generations and impossible for competitors to replicate.

Those are the things nobody else can copy. And together they create the economics of authenticity.