Ep 91. Chris Lukehurst - Melter or Chewer

So let me ask you, you joined the Meat and Livestock Commission just as mad cow disease was winding down.

And then you ran marketing for British meat straight through foot and mouth.

You've described people sitting down to their evening meal while the news showed piles of animals burning.

What did that teach you about food that you couldn't have learned any other way?

absolutely come back to that emotional response.

So it's very tempting when you're in a crisis like foot and mouth disease to try and be logical, to try and explain to the consumer that foot and mouth disease is not a threat.

to humans, that you're not going to catch it through eating the food.

What works is how does the consumer feel? As they literally, as you described, they're sitting down watching the television and they're seeing piles of animals being burned.

They're hearing these horror stories almost at the same time as they're either eating their meal or they're deciding what to cook.

What is the emotion? What is the process that's going on in their mind? Are they connecting what they're about to eat for their tea with what they're seeing on television? And how are they connecting it? And how is that going to work? So what worked with understanding those emotions that the consumer was going through? and understanding how we could communicate at that

level

rather than at the logical level.

And yeah, incredibly important.

It meant that we could get meat back to the center of the plate much more quickly than perhaps we would have done otherwise.

Yeah, the media can be a real help or a real hindrance in moving things forward, can't it?

And it depends on the stories that you give them that really matter.

And if we tried to talk to them on a logical basis and just talk to them about the disease, then they would get someone else that would talk about the disease.

But if we could talk emotionally and get them to actually connect at that emotional level, Media love those stories and they will publish them.

And we will talk about how the consumer is thinking.

And

we're not

directly in those words, but we'll talk about how the consumer is thinking and what's going to motivate them.

And we can put that into stories.

And that helps the media.

The media will spill out what you give them if there isn't.