Should organics be simpler, or should advertising be more complex?

Does organic food really need a simpler proposition?

The state of the organic market is often held up as one of the key indicators of our collective interest in ‘green’ issues.  Since the credit crunch hit, its decline been used by innumerable commentators as evidence that ‘green’ is the luxury of the rich; that in straitened financial times, environmental concerns are swiftly disposable.

To my mind though, the plight of organics highlights not a weakness in the concept, but a weakness in the advertising paradigm.

Every time the situation is analysed, as most recently in The Grocer magazine, some desperately mediocre branding ‘expert’ is wheeled out who can tell us why organic is struggling so badly – because, of course, the organic market has failed to communicate a simple, emotionally engaging message.

In the absence of an ability to deliver such clarity, organic food seems to be becoming increasingly premium, justifying its relevance to the rich few on an aura of ‘goodness’ – but for all their intentions are positive, I doubt Heston Blumenthal’s launch of the alliance between Duchy Organics and Waitrose will do much for market penetration or long-term demand sustainability.

My contention is that the search for simplicity in communicating organics is the problem, not the solution.

Have a read of this, from Riverford’s Guy Watson.

Environmental and ethical issues are never simple.  Organic farming embraces more than can be squeezed into a soundbite: the balance of wildlife and biodiversity benefits, animal welfare, absence of pesticide residues in our food, reduced CO2 emissions , severe restrictions on additives and arguably flavour and nutritional quality is just too much to convey in one snappy slogan.  Single issue products, whether fair trade, free range, ‘pesticide-free’ or local, have proved easier to sell, despite their silence on other issues.  A ‘free range’ chicken may spend next to no time outside, be kept in a shed the size of an aircraft hangar, in a sea of mud with tens of thousands of others at a stocking density double that allowed by the Soil Association, be de-beaked and fed antibiotics.  Its food will be produced with pesticides and fertilisers but none of this is a barrier to conveying a simple emotionally engaging message.  In marketing terms, it takes too many words to explain that organic poultry offers so much more.

When you start to engage with arguments like Watson’s, I believe that you start to see there is more to this than the search for a simple proposition.

More than this, I believe you start to see that if advertising cannot communicate organics, it has no place in a complex world.

The simple fact is that the world is becoming more complex, and we desperately need to move towards a time when we can embrace multifaceted, systemic solutions to our problems.  Advertising, by contrast, sells us quick fixes – off-the-peg, linear answers to (often self-generated) problems.

Advertising, not organic production, needs to change its ways.

So what would it look like for advertising to move beyond simplicity on the question of organic food?

When you start to think like this, I believe the territory becomes far more interesting.  Go back into the history of the organic movement, and you find a philosophy of equality and interdependence between man and nature, in stark contrast to the hubristic ‘man as saviour’ world of GM food.  You meet people who understand the soil, not just the seed.  You dig beneath the surface, and find a rich and hopeful world.

If you work in advertising, and that’s not something you can sell, you need to take a long hard look at yourself.

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