ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the marketing of rural food products as a means of examining the role of marketing in sustaining the rural economy. It refers to the contribution of marketing to both sustaining the level of economic activity in rural areas and the success of initiatives directed towards sustaining the natural rural environment. Marketing is a relatively recent field of academic inquiry. It has developed from multidisciplinary foundations that sought to understand changes in market behaviour, and later the process of exchange, as described by Bagozz. The marketing mission of the Milk Marketing Board (MMB) was at least in part to maximise the total return to all dairy farmers within England and Wales, with Dairy Crest developed predominantly as an outlet for the conversion of increasing volumes of milk production into butter and cheese. In striving to identify whether or not marketing can have a role in sustaining the rural economy, a number of factors have been identified.
