FW Opinion: Red Tractor needs to win hearts as well as heads
© AdobeStock/master1305 Here is a suggestion for anyone in the food supply chain – like Red Tractor – who has spent 2021 feeling sad that they’re undervalued and unloved by farmers.
You don’t just need to bring them a solution to a problem, you need to make them believe in it too.
Like it or not, much of life is a popularity contest.
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See also: Family farms must feature in future food strategy
We pick a partner based on how they make us feel rather than conducting a scientific analysis (if such a thing could be done) on who would be the most appropriate mate.
We select goods based at least in part on a gut reaction that they fit with who we are, as well as what we want.
Privately and in public, Red Tractor and its supporters seem baffled and even sorrowful that for a fairly small sum of money and an annual visit, many farmers are not delighted to take part in a collective effort to embellish farming’s credentials
Think Rolex versus Casio – both are excellent tools for telling the time, but it’s not important to everyone that one is less expensive than the other.
Companies try to align themselves with our desires, not just our needs.
The success of a company rises and falls not just on the objective quality of the product it sells compared with a rival’s, but also by tapping more successfully into the sensation that it is embellishing, not eroding, someone’s image.
So it is with Red Tractor. Here is an organisation that has a noble aim – to sell retailers protection and peace of mind by guaranteeing the food that turns up on their shelves has been produced to a certain standard.
By all accounts, the supermarkets are very happy with this arrangement.
They have to get into bed with a lot of suppliers they don’t know, and Red Tractor is the prophylactic layer that protects their reputation from attack by consumers and lobbyists.
Privately and in public, Red Tractor and its supporters seem baffled and even sorrowful that for a fairly small sum of money and an annual visit, many farmers are not delighted to take part in a collective effort to embellish farming’s credentials.
Detractors say the cost that farmers put in – both in time and money – is greater than what they get out of it.
At a media briefing this week, Red Tractor CEO Jim Moseley again highlighted that if the scheme did not exist, the cost of the alternatives set up by each supermarket in its place would be more onerous.
He may be right, but the argument that the status quo is better than the alternative didn’t work very well during the Brexit referendum and it isn’t working very well for Red Tractor either.
I call it reverse-Schoffel syndrome. No one wears a Schoffel bodywarmer (or gilet, if you’re posh) because it’s value for money.
There were none to be found for less than £140 at the Great Yorkshire Show last week, but you couldn’t walk five paces without seeing someone happy to wander around with cold arms, providing the garment has leather piping and the correct logo.
If a German clothing manufacturer can persuade farmers to be part of a premium group, how is it so difficult for a company that says it presents the best way for food producers to access the majority of retailers?
The question must also be levelled at the AHDB, soon to be the ADB, which revealed more details this week about its plans to shut down its potato and horticulture divisions after losing the confidence of farmers.
Until you make farmers believe you are essential to the image of farming they want to portray to the world, every conversation you’ll have with them will be a battle in a war that, ultimately, you will lose.