The Secrets of Food Marketing

 I'm going to give you some of the secrets about  how we make you buy, what we want you to buy. So as a marketer, when I'm first giving you a product  what's my job? My job is to make you want it   to crave it, to need it. To think that it is the best innovation in food since well, since sliced bread.

How do we do it? Well I'm going to give you a really big example later that I'm going to break right down for you. But let's just start by looking at a few fun little things. So here we have shreddies an old favorite, been around  for years, very popular in the UK and Canada. Without changing a single little thing about that  product, they remarketed them, rebranded them, as brand new diamond-shaped shreddies! Food marketing genius right there.

In the 1950s there was a very important innovation in food. The instant mix cake, one of my personal favorites. When they were first brought out all you needed to do was to  add a little bit of water, who's not going to love that? Well actually no one loved it, no one bought  the bloody things. So they did a bit of research, and what they found was that the main consumer,  the target consumer the housewife, felt that it was cheating.

They didn't want to pass off such an easy thing as their own baking, to their partners, their husbands, their families, whatever. So what did the producers have to do? They had to make it harder. So now you had to add water and an egg! And sales exploded! But these examples, these are just chicken feed compared to what I really want to talk about tonight, and that is chickens and pigs and cows. So when we think about where chickens etc come from.

We think about something a bit like that. That's our instinctive idea.   But we all know if we really think about it, if we think about it deeply. It's probably a little bit more like that.

But that's a lot nicer. It's a lot more romantic. So how do we give you this impression? Well there are three techniques that we use. The third of which is our secret weapon and I am going to blow it for you tonight, so please stay primed for that.

Let's look at technique number one. Everybody believes what's on the label. So let's look at some examples,  some of my favorites, some of the ones I use all the time. I'll use farm-fresh, I'll use 100%  natural, I'll use butchers choice.

But what does that really actually mean? Well truthfully it  doesn't mean very much. We see that on the label, we feel a bit more confident. But let's  have a look at what farm really looks like. It probably looks like that.

Now this is a concentrated animal feeding operation. I'm going to unpack that pasture again, it's a concentrated  animal feeding operation. That's not going to look great on a label. Hence we use farm-fresh.

Innovation number two. This is what we use. We focus on progress. Intensive farming was born out  of necessity.

At the end of the Second World War resources were extremely tight. Farming had to be,  it had to be by necessity, very very economical. And we've learned from that, and we've built from  that. And we were able to now raise more and more animals and smaller and smaller spaces.

So we've got extremely good at it. If we looked at a room of about this size and this would turn into a chicken barn, it's a 100 seat theater. How many chickens will be probably fit in this room  now? I'm going to say about 4, 000. It's pretty impressive isn't it! It'd probably look a little bit like that.

Now the public aren't going to be massively keen on that idea, it's my job to make them feel a little bit better about it. How do I do it? Well a basic principle of marketing. We use the right choice of words, and by using the right choice of words, we can make the conversation,  we can focus the conversation, the way we want it to. So we'll use the example of this.

When you look at that picture where is your eye drawn? It's drawn right to the middle the page. Massive letters. We've got strive to optimize. What we're looking at the picture, in reverse, looks a  bit a bit like that.

But this looks a lot nicer. Because we're looking at strive to optimize. It makes us feel like there's progress, we feel good. So the challenge for the marketers is to make the  public feel comfortable what they're seeing.

One of the side effects of intensive farming, of  having so many animals in such a small space, unfortunately it's obviously disease. Because you put so many animals into a small space, they're going to get sick. It is no secret that 50% of all the antibiotics in the world are used on farmed animals. So how to make the public feel ok with this? How does that happen? Hmm my job! How do I do it? I use the language of innovation, so we're going back to our old friends at pork cares dot org.

And what they do is they say "As farming has become more efficient, veterinarians have incorporated new technologies and methods into practice". This makes us feel good. This is positive yeah? This is progress. And when we're marketing to future consumers, we would perhaps use something like this.

This is a coloring book, pigs and pork. It's absolutely gorgeous, and what we're doing here is we're  getting the children to focus on the fact that we're using innovation. So by bringing the pigs out from the muddy field and into the clean barns we're taking them away from all that nasty dirty mud and all the diseases that are lurking there within. Positive.

So on to our secret weapon this is what we really need to focus on. So these two techniques alone, they are not going to work.   We need a secret weapon. Number three.

It is actually in this room right now. Secret weapon. It is. .

. You. So how do we do it? When you're in the supermarket, you don't want to think about  where those products have come from. You don't want to think about the how those animals have been reared, how they've been treated.

The power of willful ignorance cannot be overstated. This is systemised cruelty on a massive scale, and we only get away with it, because  everyone is prepared to look the other way.