Pringles tax folks win, but their marketing people lose

As reported by the Wall Street Journal this weekend, and commented on by Professor Bogdanski, a British court held on Friday that Pringles are not taxable as potato snacks because they are not made primarily from potatoes.  (For the nutritionally virtuous, Pringles are an ersatz potato chip manufactured by Procter & Gamble, molded to identical shape to be stackable and salable in a can.)  Had the court held Pringles to be potato snacks, they would have been subject to a 17.5& value-added tax.   

I'm not so much interested in the tax aspects of the case, as in whether the Procter & Gamble people considered whether winning this case would help or hurt their marketing.  Here are some of the judge's salty comments about Pringles (the complete opinion is here):

It cannot, in my view, be said that the legislation shows a clear policy to tax "junk food."  What difference, one might ask, is there between a turnip crisp and a potato crisp in terms of its "junkiness" or otherwise?  One might think that the answer is very little and yet the former is zero-rated and the latter standard rated.

Thus, at a high level, a Regular Pringle is similar to a potato crisp in that they are both edible: but that is certainly not the level at which the question needs to be asked.  Take an example away from snacks: an edible mushroom may be similar to a poisonous mushroom for some purposes eg classification, but is clearly dissimilar in the context of food for human consumption. 

No single ingredient in the dough accounts for more than 50% of the whole.  The percentage of potato varies: at the time of the hearing it was about 39.48%, today it is around 42.2% though it may drop again in 2008 to 35% to 38%.

This appeal is allowed because Regular Pringles are not, on the facts found, products "made from the potato, or from potato flour, or from potato starch" within excepted item 5.

Returning to my question on marketing: if I were the head marketer for Pringles, would I be happy that the people in my company's tax department had, through hard work and effort, caused a court to issue an opinion holding that my product is not made from potato, using as part of its reasoning an analogy to poisonous mushrooms?  I rather doubt it.