Continuing with research into the alcohol market conducted at Newcastle University, Emeritus Professor Christopher Ritson discusses how it is important to get your market research right.

Background

Over a 15 year period between the early 1980s to late 1990s I did a series of studies for the Government of Cyprus concerned with agricultural aspects of the country’s application to join the (then) European Community. The first was an overview of the implications of having to adopt the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This was followed by four commodity-specific studies covering milk and dairy products, fruit and vegetables, cereals, and wine. This blog reports on a spin-off of the wine study, involving a market research project in which all second year students on the then Food Marketing degree participated.

Pitfalls in Generic Advertising

Adopting the CAP for wine required radical change to the Cyprus wine policy, in which large numbers of small grape growers sold their produce to the four wine “factories” at prices fixed by the Government. By chance, when working on this, I happened to be in Nicosia when a London advertising agency presented their proposal for a campaign for Cyprus wines marketed in the UK, sponsored by the Cyprus Trade Ministry. Previously, this had involved little more than pictures of large numbers of wine bottles on a table- and (as often with generic advertising) the companies involved were more interested in how prominently their brands featured in the picture, rather than how effective the advert was likely to be. Here is one of the proposed new adverts shown at the meeting.

Reading this commentary it is not difficult to appreciate why the Trade Ministry officials and representatives on the wine companies were unimpressed by what they saw. The Agency had obviously decided that they would not promote Cyprus wines in terms of traditional wine quality variables, directed at existing UK wine consumers. Rather the idea was to attempt to attract a new younger clientele and to make a virtue of Cyprus wine’s “rather different”  quality characteristics: “Deviation from the norm”; “subtle redolence”; “not for the fainthearted”; “shock value”; “the unusual is just different”; “not bad at all”. This was in stark contrast to the view in Cyprus that their “classic“ wines were well-known and possessed traditional wine quality attributes. There was, however, an even more heinous crime in the proposal from the advertising agency.

The Wrong Gods

Here are two more of the proposed adverts.

Virtually all the wines in Cyprus in the 1980s were produced by one of four companies with no vintage years on labels, and brand names either taken from aspects of Greek mythology associated with Cyprus (e.g. “Aphrodite”; “Arsinoe”; “Thisbe”) or with the island’s historic culture (e.g. “Saint Panteleimon”; “Othello”; “Bellapais”). Anyone who has visited Cyprus will be familiar with some of these names; and if you attended any of the graduation dinners which used to be held at the Old Assembly Rooms you will recognize Othello and Aphrodite. These were the house red and white wines, a consequence of the national loyalty of the owner, Homer Michaelides.

As such, the pictures of Pan, Cyclops and Medusa featured in the proposed adverts caused outrage: “These are not our gods – they are Greek gods.” So this clashed with the requirement that the image of the wines needed to reflect the culture and history of the Island – simply being from Greek mythology was not enough. The representatives of the London Agency were told to go away and have another try.

The perils of market research

At the time, the degree programme in Agricultural and Food Marketing included a second year market research module in which all the students participated in a group project. I negotiated a small grant from the Cyprus Government to fund a survey of UK consumer knowledge and attitudes to wine from Cyprus. With about 50 students each completing 10 questionnaires among “friends and family” a good sized sample was obtained and although, of course, a “convenience sample”, nevertheless probably reasonably representative of the UK wine drinking public.

The questionnaire addressed three issues: 1) How did consumers rate wine form Cyprus compared to other wine producing countries in the Eastern Mediterranean; 2) whether consumers would value adding vintages, grape variety, and specific areas (estates) to wine labels; and 3) how familiar wine consumers were with the existing brand names. For the latter, I invented two fictitious wine brands – one a Greek God (Apollo), the other the name of a hotel in Athens (Esperion) to go alongside six  existing brands. The question was “Have you i) heard of this wine; ii) ever drunk it?

Well, maybe you have guessed by now. More participants had heard of the two fictitious Cyprus wine brands than two of the real ones; and some people had even drunk them!

But this served a very useful purpose – to correct the mistaken belief within Cyprus that their wines were well-known in the UK market, as a spur for a new marketing campaign.

“Classic Stuff”

The London advertising agency had another try. Here are two examples of the new posters (which did subsequently appear at London Tube stations).

The Agency has clearly now done its homework on the cultural history of Cyprus. There is still the jokey image, and the decision to concentrate on younger new wine drinkers has been retained, but the images are from the famous Paphos mosaics.

Postscript

There is now a number of small independent wineries in Cyprus, the best known based at a Monastery. These have adopted “estate bottled” and “vintages” in competition with the branded products of the large wine companies, which have in turn introduced new products to emulate them. A few years after the events described above, I was invited to lunch with the elderly owner of the Amathus hotel in Limassol together with the Chairman and Oenologist from the largest of the traditional wine companies. Naturally, they ordered a bottle of wine from their company and I noticed that the familiar brand now had a vintage year cited on the label. Being conversational I said “I see this is 1990”. The Oenologist did a bit of stiffing and sipping  and then replied, no – think this is 1991. “But, I said it says 1990 here”. Ah, yes, he replied, but these labels are expensive to produce so we only change them every other year.”

Mark Shucksmith, Polly Chapman, Jayne Glass, Jane Atterton.

New research shows that many rural households already experiencing poverty and financial vulnerability in Britain will be hardest hit by increases in energy costs. The new measures announced by the Chancellor will still leave many more rural households in fuel poverty.

New research shows that many rural households already experiencing poverty and financial vulnerability in Britain will be hardest hit by increases in energy costs. The new measures announced by the Chancellor will still leave many more rural households in fuel poverty.

While rural areas are often imagined to be less prone to poverty, research by the Financial Conduct Authority [i] showed that 54% of rural dwellers were financially vulnerable in 2018, and analysis [ii] of the British Household Panel Survey found that in the two decades before the financial crisis 50% of households in rural Britain experienced poverty at some point.

Our 2021 Rural Lives [iii] study explored hidden poverty and financial vulnerability in rural Britain more deeply, finding that many rural dwellers face fuel poverty [iv], higher costs of living, insecure employment and lack of access to services as these are centralised and digitalized. The state’s welfare systems are poorly adapted to rural circumstances, with lower rates of benefit take-up and additional obstacles to those in towns.

Fuel poverty is particularly prevalent in rural areas because many properties are not connected to mains gas, therefore having to rely on more expensive and less regulated sources such as oil and LPG or less efficient electric heating systems.  Houses tend to be older and poorly insulated, and difficult and costly to retrofit with insulation [v]. Furthermore, poor households in rural areas are more likely to live in private rented houses, than in urban areas where social housing is more available. On top of this, rural households incur higher transport costs in travelling to access services and employment, often with no public transport available. A recent report by the Scottish Government [vi] notes that a third of households in remote rural areas were in extreme fuel poverty [vii] in 2019 compared to 11% of households in the rest of Scotland.

Now high rates of inflation are anticipated by the Office for Budget Responsibility, and it is predicted that increases in energy costs and rising inflation will hit rural areas hardest, with 57% of households in the Western Isles and 47% in the Highlands of Scotland experiencing fuel poverty, according to modelling by Energy Action Scotland [viii]. In England,  about a third of households are predicted to experience fuel poverty in rural West Norfolk, Northeast Lincolnshire, Herefordshire and Shropshire, as well as in the Chancellor’s own constituency of Richmondshire [ix].

A comprehensive study by Robinson and Mattioli [x] has recently estimated and mapped the potential vulnerability of households in Britain to the combination of increased domestic energy costs and rising petrol prices. Their results for England in the map (below) show that it is rural households which exhibit the greatest ‘dual energy vulnerability’ and are therefore likely to suffer the greatest financial pressure in the months ahead.

The interviews conducted as part of the Rural Lives study reveal the human impact of fuel poverty in rural Britain. One person told us how he had not realised that his retired parents were suffering fuel poverty until he visited them unexpectedly one day and found them sitting in the cold with their coats on and duvets over them – he discovered then that they could only afford to switch the heating on when he was due to visit.

Another Perthshire resident told us how they kept the central heating switched off because of the expense, relying instead on collecting free firewood for a wood-burning stove. In Northumberland, we learned how some households run out of oil early in the winter and cannot afford to buy more. Despite these challenges, it was encouraging to learn about several organisations/initiatives working on this issue in each place we studied.

Addressing the cost of living crisis and rising fuel poverty facing so many rural households requires action on many levels. Most immediately it requires benefit levels to rise in line with inflation and for initiatives to promote take-up in rural areas by those who are eligible. Energy-related initiatives such as home insulation, help with the costs of oil-buying and energy efficiency measures and advice should be expanded, building on the success of existing local schemes. These could be assisted by grants for the installation of more energy-efficient heating systems for those in most need and by rural-proofing and island-proofing of new regulations which threaten the viability of rural insulation schemes [xi].

For the medium-term, encouragement for the generation of renewable energy in rural areas could be given by restoring the incentives withdrawn by the UK Government in recent years, investing in the infrastructure necessary to feed increased power into the grid, and enabling residents of these areas to benefit from the cheaper energy produced there. As one islander put it [xii], “the electricity grid was built on a system of power generation near major cities which branched out to supply peripheries. That system now needs to be reversed so that the peripheries can feed renewable energy back to the urban centres.”

Authors

References

[i] Financial Conduct Authority (2018) ‘The Financial Lives of Consumers across the UK’, Financial Conduct Authority report. 

[ii] Vera-Toscano, Shucksmith and Brown (2020) ‘Poverty Dynamics in Rural Britain 1991-2008: Did Labour’s Social Policy Reforms Make a Difference?’, Journal of Rural Studies, 75: 216-228.

[iii] Shucksmith, Chapman, Glass and Atterton (2021) Rural Lives: understanding financial hardship and vulnerability in rural areas. www.rurallives.co.uk

Shucksmith, Glass, Chapman and Atterton (2023) Rural Poverty Now: Experiences of Social Exclusion in Rural Britain, Policy Press, Bristol (in press).

[iv] Fuel poverty is defined as spending more than 10% of household income on energy, after housing costs have been deducted.

[v] https://tighean.co.uk/statement-from-tighean-innse-gall-tig-2nd-of-march-2022/

[vi] Scottish Government (2021) ‘Poverty in rural Scotland: a review of evidence’, Scottish Government report.

[vii] Extreme fuel poverty is defined as spending more than 20% of household income on energy, after housing costs have been deducted.

[viii] Energy Action Scotland (2022) https://www.eas.org.uk/en/fuel-poverty-set-to-break-the-50-barrier-in-parts-of-scotland_59652/

[ix] End Fuel Poverty Coalition (2022) https://www.endfuelpoverty.org.uk/revealed-the-streets-where-nearly-everyone-is-in-fuel-poverty/  See also: https://acre.org.uk/fuel-poverty-on-the-increase-in-rural-areas/

[x] Robinson C and Mattioli G (2021) Double energy vulnerability: Spatial intersections of domestic and transport energy poverty in England, Journal of Energy Research and Social Science, 70,

[xi] https://tighean.co.uk/statement-from-tighean-innse-gall-tig-2nd-of-march-2022/

[xii] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/12/renewable-energy-wind-changed-fortunes-lewis-islanders

Understanding the social world as urban and rural (and similar binary variations between the city and the provinces) is universal and persisting. Although this dichotomy is not something alarming per se in our engagement with places, it creates certain tensions.

For example, while scholarly discussions and textbooks about urban planning tend to ignore – even whitewash – the rural, writing a book about rural places and planning faces primarily the challenge of positioning the rural in the context of a spatial hierarchy. As a result, the rural is usually framed as the antithesis of the urban, implying a metropolitan superiority involving anything that goes on outside the city.

The reasons for this duality are well recognised in academic scholarship: the early association of the rural solely with farming and agriculture depicts a monochromatic version of what and who the rural is. However, we know that the contemporary countryside is a contested place of complex social relations, with new emergent economies and power struggles, associated with new societal challenges, mobilities, adaptation and mitigation strategies to the climate crisis, and increasingly involving all sectors of a new globalised economy; yet, it is still quite unique in that it is identified, recognised and lived as ‘rural’, however this is understood across the world. We also know that urban–rural places and identities are not binary opposites, as suggested linguistically. They are not opposite in equal terms: the rural is not the negative of a city, it is just another place that is experienced, practised, negotiated and imagined. Yet, the distinction between rural and urban places frames understandings of social life: our aspirations of where we want to live, to work, to progress.

In our new book Rural Places and Planning: Stories from the Global Countryside our challenge was to write about the ways to make it a better place. We understand the rural not as a marginal backwater that requires expert intervention, but as a contemporary, interconnected and even progressive place with its own unique challenges and opportunities. Specifically, we see the countryside as part of a global network of connected places. We explain that rural areas have assets that are place-based, meaning that these are situated within their physical (such as land, landscapes and natural resources) and built (such as infrastructures, telecommunications, housing) environments; they have assets that frame their development opportunities and limitations, their economies; they have ways of being and ways of changing based on their traditions, histories and cultures. Like many scholars before us, we frame all these assets as ‘capitals’, and while we accept that these are place-based, therefore unique in each place, we argue that in every rural place, a constellation of such linked capitals is what makes them rural. These are also the key to what can make them even better places. It is then for these communities, planners and other development agents to imagine and realise the ways that these capitals best intersect for the benefit of rural places. As such, this is a book showing how rural places function if we attempt to dismantle them into four archetypal capitals (material and non-material): the built rural, the land-based rural, the economic rural and the social and cultural rural. As a way of offering new imaginations of how planning interacts with these capitals, we theorise the relationship between planning and places through specific values that underpin actions across and with these capitals.

Our effort in this book is to avoid talking about planning systems and technocratic guidelines. We accept that in different parts of the world, planning (and rural planning) takes different forms and shapes with different priorities and rationalities. But everywhere, planning is trying to make places better: it functions as a higher instinct of human preparedness. Good planning is inseparable from place. For this reason, we specifically talk both about the idea and practice of planning in co-producing better rural places. Instead of planning systems, we discuss rural places as composite capitals that interact with each other in order to produce the rural lived experience – and aim for a better experience.

As a way to embed our scholarship into rural place, we bring into the book practical examples of how different types of capitals – which are of course always interconnected – interact across 12 case studies from the global countryside. These cover our ‘stories’, ranging from decarbonisation strategies addressing climate change to rural art festivals promoting community action and economic development; and from illegal deals and land grabbing, to recognising diversity and queer lives in the countryside. And more: rural community responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting ecosystem services to local needs, delivering housing, infrastructure and smart technologies, the roles of cultural and natural heritage in rural development.

Our goal has been to produce a book that is pan-national, but not necessarily universal, in devising a recipe of the ‘perfect mix’ of such constituent capitals. Whatever works, works for a particular place. We accept that the different forms of capitals take different shapes, that it is impossible to summarise such interconnections universally. But our argument is that there is opportunity for learning, that in each place of the world, rural places do present a unique amalgam of such capitals which also frames their development opportunities and needs. And rural planning, as a broader social practice embedded in place, must organise and reorganise that amalgam in supporting the futures they deserve.

Menelaos Gkartzios is Reader in Planning and Rural Development at Newcastle University. Nick Gallent is Professor of Housing and Planning at University College London. Mark Scott is Professor of Planning at University College Dublin.

This blog was first published on the Transforming Society website.

In Part 1 of his blog, Emeritus Professor Christopher Ritson hinted at the major social changes influencing the beer drinking market in the North East. Here, he delves deeper into these and their impact on drinking habits.

A few years before the events outlined in Part 1, there were billboards around Tyneside advertising Newcastle Exhibition. These showed a group of “lads” running towards a Blue Star pub. The caption was “The last one to the pub’s a lager drinker.” This epitomized the failure of the Brewery to appreciate the social revolution undermining the traditional market for their products. Lager (they believed) was a women’s drink (“Lager and Lime”), which indeed it had been, in the early post-war period. Whether such a sexist marketing campaign would have been chosen today is debatable, but the assumptions underlying the advert were then already out of date.

The 1960s social revolution

I recall the words of a participant in one of the discussion groups: “I remember the day my dad took me to the club and bought me my first pint. And I hated it – but you gradually learn to get a taste for it”. That is how most boys were introduced to pubs and clubs and thus became incorporated into the culture and tradition of beer consumption in the North-East. But not anymore. By the late 1960s, young people we socializing in their own groups, and an important characteristic in their patterns of beer consumption was to choose products which were different from those consumed by their parents, preferably at different locations. (Another example of this was how coffee became the drink of choice among young people in England in the 1960’s, the main motivation being that it was “not tea”.) We advised Newcastle Breweries that there was nothing about the taste or image of lager which attracted young people, other than that it was “their product”, and not what their fathers drank.

The Brewery Response

Newcastle Breweries launched a new product, called “Newcastle Bright”, which was (I quote the Marketing Manager) “entirely based on your research”. It was targeted at young drinkers, as a lager type beer they could identify with. Now, it would be nice at this point if I could report that it was a roaring success, but it flopped. CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) got their teeth into it. The momentum behind CAMRA’s drive against “tasteless sterilized” beer in stainless steel kegs, and for a return to cask conditioned hand-pumped “real “ale, was now well underway.  As a beer  product, Newcastle Bright was just about as far removed from Real Ale as you could get.

 In our defense, our research was designed to explain why the market for beer was changing, not to provide a blueprint for a new product. In practice, it is extremely difficult for a company to launch a new product which will capture demand from an autonomous trend. The rise of lager consumption (and its unfortunate spin-off – the “lager lout”) were spontaneous social developments, not something created by the Breweries.

The Bigg Market 

We did two further studies for Newcastle Breweries. One, based entirely on a series of group discussions, looked specifically at the emerging drinking behaviour of young people. A particularly enlightening group consisted of a gang of girls who met every Thursday for a tour of the Bigg Market, which by then had become the centre for nightlife in Newcastle. Where did they meet up, and why; what did they wear and why; what did they drink and why; the specific route taken (always the same). Some aspects of this social drinking behaviour were difficult to resolve. For example, why were they willing to queue for entry to places early in the evening, which were empty later on; and queue for entry to places later in the evening, which were empty earlier! We were not aware of  any major action taken by the Brewery in response to this second study unlike, however, the case with the third.

Plastic Plants

 The third study was an intensive investigation of all the pubs in a specific locality (Kenton), about half of which were managed by Newcastle Breweries. Because of the location, the area’s residents had a choice of several alternative pubs. So what influenced their choice? Was it the beer, the brewery, the decor, the clientele, the atmosphere? At the time, there was a major refurbishment programme underway to smarten up the Newcastle pubs. But there was no attempt to give individual pubs a specific identity, as would be the case today. It was similar carpets and furniture and pictures, irrespective of the pub; and…plastic plants. What we discovered was that people hated the plastic plants. They associated their presence with a lack of a caring management, a “couldn’t be bothered to make an effort” attitude. So, our research programme did have one significant impact. Virtually overnight, plastic plants disappeared from the entire Newcastle Breweries Estate.

The philosophy underlying successful marketing is, of course,  for a company to identify and meet its customers’ needs and wants. I still find it astonishing that Newcastle Breweries knew so little about the market for their beer.  

Following on from his earlier posts of the history of the Centre for Rural Economy, Emeritus Professor Christopher Ritson recounts how research for a well-known local brand provided insight into North East beer drinkers habits.

Soon after I joined the Agricultural Marketing Department in 1980, we were approached by Newcastle Breweries with a request to investigate an issue which was troubling them over what seemed to be a major change in the market for their beers in the North East of England. “Newcastle Breweries” was then the English branch of “Scottish and Newcastle Breweries”. Their administration offices were located in the building which is now the Sandman Signature hotel in Gallowgate, with the old brewery in the area behind, which is now Science City. From the boardroom at the top of the building (this was prior to the massive development of St James’ Park) you could see most of the Newcastle United pitch. Newcastle Breweries was the first major sponsor of Newcastle United. Forty years later, you still sometimes see people wearing black and white shirts with the Blue Star and “Newcastle Brown Ale” on the front. The boardroom was, I suppose, much the same as any other, except that there was a tap set in one of the oak- panelled walls, from which Newcastle Exhibition could be poured.

The research questions

A lot of local companies at that time felt they “ought” to be doing some market research but were not quite sure what they wanted to find out. However, Newcastle Breweries came to us with two very specific research questions:

1. Why were beer drinkers in the North East “switching” (this was their term) from their traditional preference for the Company’s high gravity beers to lighter beers and lager?
2. Was this because their leading high gravity brand – Newcastle Exhibition – gave people headaches?

That there was a rumour going round that drinking Exhibition caused headaches was confirmed by the Faculty Registrar when I met him to discuss the funding requirements. Dealing with question 2) clearly raised tricky ethical issues and I met a drugs specialist in the Medical School to explore what might be possible. We did not, however, proceed with this. Talking to beer drinkers, it became apparent that, yes, if you drank a vast amount of Exhibition you got a headache. But this was also the case with the other popular high gravity brands such as those produced by the Sunderland company, Vaux, and the Federation Brewery, which supplied working men’s clubs throughout the North East. However, although “headaches” were therefore not specific to Exhibition, nor were they, we discovered, anything at all to do with the first question.

What we did

We designed a fairly conventional marketing research project. This consisted of around a dozen discussion groups (which would now be called “focus groups”, after the research technique was hijacked from Marketing by political parties). These fed into a survey of 1000 male beer drinkers in the North East, the breweries’ main target audience.

The discussion groups were professionally recruited and the survey was administered by a local market research agency. Each group consisted of 8-10 male beer drinkers, and was held in private rooms in pubs or clubs in Tyneside and South East Northumberland (with appropriate refreshments provided!). The participants really enjoyed talking about beer, their likes and dislikes, and how visiting pubs and clubs fitted into their lives. A wealth of information was obtained on the tradition and culture of beer consumption in the North East.

Being a local lad who could speak the language, at one group I played the role of a participant to see whether this might be a way of teasing out information which prompting from a moderator could not. On only one occasion did anything go wrong, and this was just a minor mishap. The group was held in the Rex Hotel in Whitley Bay, and the agency had been instructed to provide between 8 and 10 male beer drinkers aged (say) between 35 and 50. When we got there we found eight middle-aged males and one little old lady in the discussion room. We pushed ahead and the lady had as much to say about beer as the rest. However, when we broke for refreshments, it emerged that she was supposed to be at the flower arranging class in an adjacent room.

The survey collected mainly factual information to match the deeper information on culture and traditions which emerged from the groups: socio-economic data which could be related to brand preference and consumption levels. In the event, we had only 999 useable questionnaires. This was because we had only allowed for two digits in the computer coding system for answers to the question “How many pints of beer do you normally drink in a week” (Think about it!). The response was genuine. The agency supervisor checked it and this was a bachelor building worker who said he drank 12 pints at lunch time, and 12 in the evening, and typically would have “a couple of cans in the park while he was waiting for them to open”.

The answer

There was a fairly straightforward answer to Question 1. Beer drinkers in the North-East were not “switching” to lighter beers and lager. Virtually all the men we talked to remained as loyal as they had always been to their favourite beers (including Newcastle Exhibition). However, analysis of our survey data showed that lighter beers, and particular lager, were consumed predominantly by young (i.e., 18-25-year-old) consumers. The new generation was choosing a different product form their forebears.

With the benefit of hindsight, this conclusion looks blatantly obvious. But if it was, why had Newcastle Breweries assumed that “switching” was the explanation? A major social revolution was underway right under their noses, of which they were completely unaware. For what happened next – you’ll have to wait for Part 2.

Following on from the introduction to how the Centre for Rural Economy (CRE) came into existence, Professor Christopher Ritson takes a look at the Faculty of Agriculture at Newcastle 50 years ago and comments on some of the main things which have changed since then.

Have you ever wondered why our building has an eighth floor, like a set of portacabins stuck on a flat roof?

Before I tell you, it is necessary to state that Part II of this blog comes with a health warning. To the best of my knowledge, Part I was an accurate, mainly factual, account of the evolution at Newcastle of social science related to agriculture, food and the rural economy in the 25 years prior to the establishment of the CRE. Part II draws on my experience as a Research Associate in the Agricultural Adjustment Unit (AAU) for one year, 1968/1969. It is based on ‘things I was told’ then, and also when I had returned to Newcastle as Head of the Agricultural Marketing Department ten years later. It contains  some ‘conjecture’ on my part!

The Eighth Floor

The Agriculture Building, designed in the 1950s for the Faculty of Agriculture at King’s College, is a classic example of soulless post- war British architecture. The Faculty consisted of seven departments – so, one floor for each department? Well, not quite. Agricultural Engineering occupied the Porter Building at the bottom of St Thomas Street, but otherwise it was Agriculture on floor 1; Agricultural Economics on 2; Agricultural Zoology and Plant Science (subsequently merged as Agricultural Biology) on 3 and 4; Soil Science on 5; and Agricultural Biochemistry on 6. Floor 7 was common user labs. Thus when the Ministry of Agriculture funded the addition of an eighth department, some  extra accommodation had to be added on the roof. That is where the Department of Agricultural Marketing was located until the Faculty expanded during the 1980s into the vacated Old Medical School building across the road.

The eighth floor also contained a glass “Insect House” at the south end, so marketing staff in need of a break could go onto the roof and watch the locusts flying around. The Insect House was not the only wildlife kept in the Agriculture Building. If you left the building via the basement then you would usually hear a few “Baa’s” on your way out, from the sheep kept there.

Two new professors

Having 6-8 small departments of roughly equal size in each faculty was typical of the University structure at that time. Each department would have an “Established” named Chair, and “The Professor” was usually also the Head of Department. However, in 1960 there was no Professor of Agricultural Economics at Newcastle. So how did a nondescript backwater of the subject acquire two of them and large injections of funding to develop Agricultural Marketing and the AAU? Elsewhere in the country, agricultural economics was characterized by a small number of high-profile individuals who dominated their own local territory. So, ‘what I was told’ is that Agricultural marketing was first offered by the Ministry to another English university, but the incumbent professor there turned it down, because it would lead to ‘divide and rule’. Thus, the lack of a dominant figure who might feel threatened by a second Chair was instrumental in Newcastle being chosen. 

There were two attempts at filling the new Chair in Agricultural Marketing, and eventually, the head of Agricultural Economics, Mark Carpenter, was appointed. The Ministry representative on the Selection Committee was their deputy head of Economics, John Ashton, and he persuaded King’s College that what they really needed was a Professor of Agricultural Economics as well, and that he was the man for the job.  The status of a professor at that time is evidenced by the fact that John Ashton had written into his appointment that the Chair in Agricultural Economics would be “the Senior Chair in this area”. Soon after his appointment, John Ashton met the representative from the Kellogg Foundation (who was in search of a suitable location in Europe to promote agricultural adjustment) at King’s Cross. By the time the train reached Newcastle Central Station, the whole thing was sorted (doubtless with a degree of assistance from the buffet bar).

Experience as a Research Associate

The AAU was a very fertile place for a young researcher to learn his trade. There was a variety of projects to work on, and excellent guidance from senior staff. One who was particularly supportive of me was a retired Australian trade diplomat, Frank Grogan. He had the capacity to incorporate the word ‘bloody’ into nearly every sentence. The one that has always stuck in my mind was his subtle refinement of Ricardian trade theory into ‘Comparative Bloody Advantage’.

One piece of work that I was given concerned a survey of Northern dairy farms commissioned by the Ministry in which the usual summary tables did not really tell you anything. John Ashton asked if I could (what would now be described as) ‘sex it up’ a bit with some quantitative analysis. Quantitative analysis then involved putting data on to a set of punch cards, taking them to ‘The University Computer’, and returning the following day to collect the printout. The data set was remarkable in that nothing seemed to be related to anything else, no matter how rational the hypothesis – e.g. economies of scale. But then I had a eureka moment when the printout came back with a fantastic R²; until, that is, I realized I had managed to put the same variable on both sides of the equation.

Back to the eighth floor

The staff complement for the Department of Agricultural Marketing consisted of a professor, six lecturers, a demonstrator (teaching assistant), a computational officer, two clerical staff (typists), and a butcher, Ken (not joking). Ken had been employed  given the departments  intitial research having been commissioned by the Meat and Livestock Commission on consumer attitudes within the red meat sector. One evening Ken worried that he had left the oven on in the meat laboratory (kitchen) on the eighth floor. He telephoned University Security and asked them to check. Half an hour later the security officer telephoned back and said he was sorry, but the Agriculture Building did not have an eighth floor. (He believed the lift!)

For the Agricultural Marketing department, at first, the working week included Saturday morning. (probablya legacy of its Ministry funding, and not a University-wide practice).  On Saturday mornings, Mark Carpenter would stroll round the roof to look in every office window to check that all were present. Once he observed one of the lecturers, David Lesser, with his feet up reading The Times, and told him subsequently that he was not there “to educate himself”. For most staff, working on the eighth floor on Saturday mornings was viewed mainly as an overture to The Hotspur at lunch time. This requirement to work on Saturday mornings did not last long, though the Hotspur tradition lived on for more many more years.

Plus Ça Change

So, “things were different in them days”. What stands out was the university structure of many small departments, in faculties not much bigger than today’s Schools. (Large Schools of course then have to create divisions with ‘line managers’, a bit like the old departments.) There were few professors, and virtually all occupied ‘Established Chairs’. Promotion to Professor almost always meant moving to a different university. This was the case for Ken Thompson, Alan Buckwell, and David Harvey (as I mentioned in Part I), and indeed also for me.

One other major difference occurred to me while writing this. During my first few years in the agricultural marketing department, the degree of Agricultural and Food Marketing had an annual intake of 50-55 students, which was very large for a small department. Of those who reached graduation, typically, 30% would be awarded an upper second, 60% a lower second and 10% a Third. Every other year or so, a First Class degree would be awarded to an outstanding student (a different ratio to today’s intake).

One of the merits of a small department, with perhaps just a single degree programme, was the sense of identity and community spirit it gave to both staff and students. This is lacking in large Schools. Alumni from 40 years ago have no idea to which bit of the current university they relate. However, I think the CRE, at least for staff and research students, has recreated this lost sense of identity – of belonging to something – of a community of like-minded individuals with similar interests. Let us hope they do not now decide to merge the CRE with something else, to create “a larger more efficient” unit.

With the Centre for Rural Economy fast approaching its 30^th birthday next year, Emeritus Professor Christopher Ritson recounts the 25 years of social science agriculture, food and the rural economy prior to the centre’s establishment.

In this first Blog I want to put on record the string of events over a period of 25 years which led to the establishment of the Centre for Rural Economy (CRE). In Part II, I take a more light-hearted look at life in the Agriculture Building 50 years ago.

­Where did it all begin?

Oddly, it started with the arrival of Agricultural Marketing at Newcastle. During the 1950s, the UK moved rapidly from early post-war food shortage and rationing, in which the policy priority was increasing output and improving the productivity of domestic agriculture, to the problem becoming declining and unstable farm product prices. The challenges of this period were reminiscent of those faced in 1930s, which had led to the establishment of Marketing Boards for most agricultural commodities.

In this context, the Ministry of Agriculture, which had developed the network of farm business data collection based in agricultural economics departments throughout the country, decided that agricultural economics research needed to move away from concentrating on farm production economics towards studying the economics of post-farm gate markets. In the early 1960s, it financed the creation of a Chair and Department of Agricultural Marketing at King’s College, Newcastle (then part of Durham University, but soon to become independent as the University of Newcastle upon Tyne). Here is an extract from the press release issued under the name of the Rector of King’s College, Charles Bosanquet:

“Experience has convinced both the Ministry and King’s College that there is an extreme shortage of economists adequately trained to study distribution economics, and that the changes in the agricultural policy of the UK that may be expected will make it desirable to build up studies in marketing to the point at which they at least equal the national effort in production economics.”

Why Newcastle was chosen for this substantial investment is something of a mystery, as there were, at the time, around a dozen agricultural economics centres throughout the UK with a more distinguish academic profile than Newcastle. (I can offer one explanation, albeit based only on anecdotal evidence. For this you will have to wait for Part II of this blog.)

Agricultural Adjustment

This was the first step in the journey towards the broader study of the rural economy – the application of “economic principles to the problems of identifying and satisfying the needs and preferences of consumers, by the most effective use of markets, processing plants, transport, advertising, and retail outlets.” (Again, from the Bosanquet press release.)

In parallel with this was the view that the structure of farming itself needed to “adjust” to the way agricultural product markets and consumer food demand were evolving. So, just a few years after the Ministry of Agriculture’s finance of agricultural marketing at King’s College, there was a second massive investment, this time by the Kellogg Foundation, to establish the Agricultural Adjustment Unit (AAU). The Grant was secured by the recently appointed Professor of Agricultural Economics, John Ashton (more of this in Part II), and provided five years funding for six research associates, together with support staff.

The upshot was that over a period of 10 years, from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, agricultural economics at Newcastle was transformed from something of a backwater into one of the leading UK centres for social science research related to agriculture, food and the rural economy.

Agricultural Marketing at Newcastle was awarded the top grade in the first national Research Assessment Exercise. However, the main legacy of the agricultural marketing initiative turned out to be in teaching. The Chair in Agricultural Marketing is reputed to be the first anywhere in Europe with the word “marketing” in its title. The Department’s MSc in Marketing (note, just “marketing”, not agricultural marketing) was the first marketing degree in the UK, and the BSc Agricultural and Food Marketing, the first “marketing” undergraduate degree. Gradually, marketing came to dominate “agriculture and food” with many new teaching initiatives, most of which have now been transferred to the Business School.

The baton for meeting the Ministry requirement for agricultural economics research to support “the changes in agricultural policy in the UK that may be expected” was, in part, picked up by three members of staff in the Agricultural Economics department, Ken Thompson, Allan Buckwell, and David Harvey, who together published a book on the subject, titled “The Cost of the Common Agricultural Policy” (1982). Soon all three were to leave for Chairs at Aberdeen, Wye College, and Reading respectively, though David was only on loan to Reading for a few years!

Countryside Change

Perhaps the most important step on the path towards the creation of the CRE itself was the work of Martin Whitby. Martin was a lecturer in agricultural economics during the time of the AAU, and a major contributor to its output. Part of the “adjustment” envisaged for the agricultural sector concerned rural employment and labour migration, and this was Martin’s area of expertise. When the funding for the AAU ended, Martin carried his interest forward with a sort of “slimmed down” version of it.

The AAU eventually became the Countryside Change Unit (CCU), following a successful bid to a call from the ESRC in 1987 by Martin and David Harvey (by then back at Newcastle) for research into the changing nature of the British countryside. The ESRC funded two centres in response to their call, the CCU at Newcastle (three full time researchers for five years – of whom one was current CRE director Guy Garrod), and a similar unit at University College London (UCL), co-led by Philip Lowe.

The creation of the CRE

When the Chancellor of Newcastle University, the Duke of Northumberland, died in 1988, a funding appeal was launched in his memory. A blueprint for a “Centre for Rural Economy”, written by Martin Whitby, was put forward from the Faculty of Agriculture in response to a university-wide invitation for proposals for the funding raised. Given the dominance of the Medical School at Newcastle, it was expected that funds from appeals of this kind would usually finance medical research. However, Martin’s proposal struck a chord with the land-owning Northern contributors to the Duke of Northumberland Appeal, and the proposal to create a Centre for Rural Economy was the successful application.

That the Centre would be located in the Faculty of Agriculture (then in the process of becoming the larger Faculty of Agriculture and Biological Sciences) was not a foregone conclusion. The Head of the Department of Geography, John Goddard, put forward an academic case for the Centre to be in Geography as part of, or at least alongside, the high-profile Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS). However, the Agriculture Dean, Keith Syers (the Head of a faculty was then called “The Dean”) told me that the message coming from the major donors to the appeal fund was that they regarded it as “unthinkable” that the Centre would not be located “in Agriculture”.

Nevertheless, Geography was accorded a role in the establishment of the CRE. John Goddard and I (at the time, head of the recently merged Department of Agricultural Economics and Food Marketing) jointly undertook a series of informal interviews with long-list candidates for what had become designated as “The Duke of Northumberland Professor of Rural Economy”. Four candidates went forward for final interview. The successful candidate was the Director of the UCL CCU, Philip Lowe. In addition, a personal Chair was also secured for Martin Whitby.

Thus, the CRE was born. In Part II I take a more light-hearted look at life in the Agriculture Building 50 years ago.

There have been plenty of discussions surrounding how the UK farming subsidy system should change with the UK leaving the EU following the Brexit vote. There has been considerably little attention paid to the changes this might bring for the UK countryside, and what the public want the UK countryside to look like. In our recent paper, we looked to address this through the use of a national survey and innovative collage-making exercise.

The EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has provided farmers with subsidies, traditionally based on how much land they managed, but in more recent revisions, on actions farmers take to provide several environmental benefits as well. Through Brexit, the UK has the opportunity to develop its own agricultural policies to shape the farming system. The 2020 Agriculture Bill will form the basis of the replacement of CAP payments for farmers, and looks to continue the push towards delivering environmental benefits by offering payment to farmers not only for the production of food but for the delivery of public goods such as habitat creation, soil protection and carbon storage. Switching from supporting farmers primarily for food production to focusing on more environmental benefits could significantly alter how UK farmland looks and functions. As the new schemes will be funded by taxpayers, the public should have a say in how the country’s farmland will be managed and looks.

So what do the UK pubic want from their countryside? We used two complementary methods:

1) A more traditional nationwide survey of 2,050 adults which asked participants to rate ten images of diverse UK farming landscapes, and;

2) A collage-creating exercise with 80 people, where they were asked to create two landscapes: firstly for an environmentally friendly farm, and secondly their ideal farm. This was designed to provide a creative way for individuals to demonstrate their vision of Britain’s farmed landscape, and allowed people to express their ideas and desires in ways that are hard to capture with surveys and verbal interviews.

Livestock: nice to look at, bad for the planet

What we found really surprised us. Whilst there were some differences in relation to socio-demographic characteristics, both the surveys and collages revealed that most people in the study liked seeing livestock in their ideal landscape. Yet many thought that for a farm to be environmentally friendly, it should have less livestock due to the greenhouse gas emissions they produce. Instead, most participants thought “green” farms should have lots of trees (good for the atmosphere and air pollution) and renewable energy installations, though many admitted that they didn’t like the look of wind farms. Interestingly, there was no significant difference in the kind of landscapes preferred by farmers compared with the rest of the public we surveyed.

Diversity, in relation to agricultural practices and increased biodiversity, was a key theme arising from the collages. Most of the people involved in the study said they were keen for farms to produce a mixture of food and benefits for the environment – such as carbon storage, wildflowers for insects to pollinate, and trees to improve air quality – rather than focusing on just food or environmental benefits. The majority of the people surveyed also wanted to increase food production in the UK rather than importing food from elsewhere.

What next for agricultural policy in the UK?

Our findings highlight the complexity involved in making green agricultural policy, touching on a few of the competing demands and trade-offs involved in producing food whilst still protecting the environment. For example, while most participants in our study stated that they were less interested in these landscapes producing cheap food, studies on buyer behaviour show that consumers, especially those on lower incomes, are mainly motivated by price when it comes to food. Finding the right balance will therefore be tricky. The UK government clearly has its work cut out devising policies that produce food in an environmentally friendly way at prices cheap enough to ensure retailers don’t source more food than necessary from abroad, essentially displacing any environmental savings that an improved farming system could offer the UK.

The research was undertaken by CRE colleagues Niki Rust, Francis Naab, Lucia Rehackova, Beth Clark and Sophie Tindale, alongside Amber Abrams (University of Cape Town), Courtney Hughes (Gov. of Alberta, Canada) and Bethann Garramon Merkle (University of Wyoming). The full paper can be accessed here.

There is little research about how small firms in rural areas manage crises and how they recover. The National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE), co-led by the Centre for Rural Economy, is launching a survey to explore how rural businesses have respondend to COVID-19.

Rural resilience has received relatively little attention. Over the next two months NICRE is speaking to more than 4,000 rural and farm businesses in the North East, South West and Midlands to find out more about the strategies they have put in place during the pandemic to increase their resilience and their plans and expectations for the future.

Whilst every business in the UK has been challenged in some way over the last year due to COVID-19, those in rural areas have been some of the hardest hit. NICRE co-director Prof Stephen Roper, from the Enterprise Research Centre at Warwick University is leading the survey: “Our large-scale survey fills an important gap in our current knowledge of rural enterprise and aims to improve how local and national government support rural businesses in the future.”

Alongside resilience, the survey will explore how firms’ local networks have contributed to survival and growth, the impact of financial pressures on businesses, families and communities as well as issues around workforce, the availability of broadband, and aspects of local supply chains. The survey will also seek the views of a comparator sample of urban firms with owners contacted at random by independent market research agency OMB Research. Results of the surveys will be available in the autumn.

NICRE, which was established to foster rural enterprise and unlock the potential in rural economies, is also keen to speak businesses in more detail. Prof Roper said: “We would be very interested to talk in-depth to the owners of rural and farming firms about how you and your business have coped during the pandemic, the challenges you have faced, and what you think about the support you have received from Government and local agencies.

“We’d really like to hear your views to help us shed light on rural resilience and contribute, through NICRE, to developing future policy support for businesses in rural areas.”

Any business interested in giving their views should contact Prof Roper at Stephen.Roper@wbs.ac.uk

For more information about NICRE email nicre@newcastle.ac.uk or follow @NICRErural on Twitter.

Ian Merrell has recently returned to the University after a spell of working at Exeter University. Here he draws on findings from his research into Rural Enterprise Hubs to highlight their value for the rural economy.

I’m a qualitative researcher in rural development and enterprise and I’ve recently joined NICRE as a post-doctoral researcher, after a stint away from the North East. 

I am somewhat of a product of Newcastle University’s Centre for Rural Economy’s excellent tradition of educating the next generation of land managers, farmers and environmental scientists. I’ve completed a BSc in Countryside Management, MSc in Rural Development and a PhD supervised by NICRE’s own Prof Jeremy Phillipson, Prof Matthew Gorton and Dr Paul Cowie and I’m delighted to be working with the three of them again on this exciting venture.

My thesis investigated the North East’s rich stock of Rural Enterprise Hubs, which are physical infrastructures designed to support rural businesses by providing workspaces, meeting rooms, kitchen facilities, networking groups and learning seminars. We recognised the importance of these hubs for rural development, but at the time knew little of their successful internal dynamics, the benefits they provide to tenants, and their wider role in promoting entrepreneurial and innovative behaviour. Another aspect of the thesis was to investigate the appropriateness and relevance of the regional governance system for fostering innovation, particularly for rural areas.

When I heard that the proposal to establish NICRE was successful, I knew it was the environment I wanted to immerse myself in! Working alongside the private, public and third sector, as well as bottom-up initiatives from the community to solve some of society’s grand challenges – sign me up!

I intend to continue my exploration of Rural Enterprise Hubs as a valuable resource for the rural economy at NICRE. One of our main aims is to enable rural enterprise and innovation through knowledge exchange networks to overcome challenges and barriers associated with the rural environment – Rural Enterprise Hubs are an excellent mechanism to help aid this process. NICRE will be a key component in a Quadruple (N^th-ruple) Helix – a model of governing innovation that my PhD found to be highly appropriate for integrating rural areas into the larger strategic plans of regional development. I thoroughly look forward to working in this model alongside great partners to create real-world impact and contribute towards some of the most important challenges of our time.

I will be drawing on my other experience in my role at NICRE. During my PhD I worked as a research associate on two EU projects which, after presenting my research on Rural Enterprise Hubs, have since pursued the idea of creating hubs in their regions. I also worked with an excellent team of researchers at the Centre for Rural Policy Research at Exeter University before joining NICRE where I embarked on the ambitious (and somewhat unknown to me) task of coaching rural tourism businesses, inspired by the tradition of action research. I met a wide array of businesses, each facing their own challenges and with their own inspiring ideas to overcome them. Never underestimate the innovative potential of rural micro-businesses!

There are certainly exciting times ahead.

This was first published on the National Innovation Centre for Rural Enterprise (NICRE) blog.