It’s not how it looks

Last week on the early train from Bath to London I was surrounded by dozens of farmers. Either that or they’d been sent by central casting to audition for a lead role in a new countryside drama and were wearing all the right rural gear to look the part.

The jackets were Barbour, and the plaid plus-fours were tucked into immaculate wellington boots that bore the logos of Hunter or Le Chameau. They also had those stout leather sticks that unfold into mini seats – which can come in handy on a GWR train.

But, for all the clichés in that carriage, these were real farmers on a serious mission to protest in Whitehall against Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision to levy inheritance tax on farming land, albeit at a reduced rate the rest of us pay.

The spokespeople had some good arguments on their side. While the value of the land under the plough might run into millions, the rewards for working it are derisory. Long weeks of rising at 5am to sow wheat in horizontal rain might yield less than a jobbing accountant makes sitting at a desk nibbling on a digestive biscuit where the crop ends up. The average yearly return from working a UK farm, according to Government figures, is just £45,300.

The trouble is, that’s not how it looked. The optics were all wrong. These white, middle-aged men, as most of them were, in their clean countryman attire, came over as posh. A benign and unassuming kind of posh – the kind you might want to put your arms around – but, wearing kit with a price tag, new, of about £1,350 per person, a million miles from impoverished.

Nor did it help that some of the children they took along for the day were photographed steering their mini play-tractors outside the Houses of Parliament. “Well, I wish I could afford a toy like that for my kids,” might be the response of the average, urban minimum-wage worker.

I couldn’t help thinking that my travel companions would have been better boarding that train in their everyday mud-splattered overalls, smelling of manure and milking sheds. Less dignified, for sure, but more telegraphic. As it was, they had substance on their side but not sympathy.

Landowners vs brand owners

If the foundational stratum of our food production industry is unpractised in the marketing arts of image and optics – and why wouldn’t it be? – the brand-owning businesses further up the chain play the game almost too well.

Products that amount to beige powders or yellow fats get endowed with brand names constructed from a rotated rustic lexicon: vale, valley, field, meadow, mill, dairy, gate, county, nature, cow and, of course, farm.

Packs with words like emulsifiers, lecithin, ammonia and disodium 5 ribonucleotides, in the minimum-size font on the back, feature idealised bucolic images of wholesome pastoral goodness on the front.

Grocery retailers place the fresh fruit and vegetables at the entrance of the store to frame the entirety of the experience in a mood of elemental bounty – a kind of guiltless ‘wrapper’ for the oversweet, overfat, over-processed offers in the crisp, snack and ready-meal aisles beyond.

And marketing teams, whether for big brands or own label, are not above crude but effective cues like the use of leafy green on signage or the inclusion of a big tick next to the word ‘natural’ because the product happens to have a little maize in it, while meeting the absolute minimum standards for the claim.

Whether these communications tactics will be enough to stem the tide of warnings about diabetes, obesity and the constantly emerging health risks of ultra-processed food is another matter. The attack on that front is sustained and getting louder.

And if the farmers lobby awakens consumer appreciation of the commercial realities of selling what they produce to mightier links in the buying chain, that might yet be another front on which food and grocery retail brands need to engage.

That might mean preparing consumers for fairer but higher prices, perhaps underpinned by the statistic that just 11.8% of UK disposable income goes on food and non-alcoholic drink. Some smaller packaged food brands are already adopting that approach, but it’s a lonely road to travel when everyone else is outbidding one another to claim to be the cheapest.

Trading places

Marketing is always a fusion of substance and image. That the dedication and output of our farmers embody the former is in little doubt. They will pick up some of the tricks of presentation and image soon enough and learn to shake off the privileged-landowner vernacular. In fact, the request from Tom Bradshaw, president of the National Farmers Union, that rich, famous Jeremy Clarkson desist from speaking for farmers on inheritance tax would indicate that they are well on the road.

But food brands and grocery retail are going to have to come at things the other way around, improving the quality of what they sell, reducing the excesses of their ultra-processing methods – and being seen to reward the farmers at the base of things with fairer returns.

Improve the substance: it’s always the keystone of long-term marketing endeavour. Because once you take product for granted, no matter how adroit your naming, branding, image-building and optics might be, the brand ends up losing the sympathy of the consumer.

Or worse. It ends up smelling of manure.