Is this course any good?
It’s brilliant. Not only are you going to learn everything you would learn from studying a marketing course at a college or university, but you’re also going to come away just being glad to be alive. OK, I understand I’m going to need to back that up for you to believe me. First, the course has been put together by myself, David Pannell, and my partner (in all things in life) Lisa Fox. Lisa herself spent a decade in a busy marketing department in a large manufacturing business, writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living Magazine and now advises high-street brands and large food manufacturers on registering their product with The Vegan Society’s Vegan Trademark scheme as their official UK agent.
As for myself (David), in my previous life I was a specialist ambassador for the Chartered Institute of Marketing, have co-written award-winning marketing and design courses for university centres, have delivered high-impact marketing bootcamps which have been attended by thousands of people (dare I embarrass Lisa here and say that’s how we actually met!) and have set-up, run (and even sold) my own marketing agencies for over 20 years, working with some of the biggest companies in the UK.
Yeah, I hear you say, but loads of people have done that. Jeez, tough crowd. OK. We’re also vegan business owners, just like you – and that affects everything we write and all the advice we give. There is already lots of great marketing and business advice out there, but it’s generic and it can be hard to know how to apply it to YOUR business – and especially your VEGAN business. If you own a vegan cafe what are you going to learn from McDonald’s as a case study?
Going vegan ourselves led Lisa and I to sell the successful marketing agency that we were running and launch our agency Promote Vegan, which works with some of the biggest brands in the world to help them better understand the vegan consumer and improve their vegan offering. In this course you will find everything that these large international brands pay us the big bucks to help them with.
We read the ‘Mintel reports’ and work with The Vegan Society on their latest consumer insight data and vegan trends so that you don’t have to. However, you also get something in this course that the mostly non-vegan food companies we try to educate do not get: the raw, unfiltered, vegan Lisa and David.
You can only teach someone who isn’t vegan themselves so much about successfully marketing to the vegan sector. For them, they want statistics and key performance indicators on the latest trends. They will never really connect with the plant-based consumers they want to know about. For you, we can go ‘full vegan’. When I deliver a seminar to a room full of executives from non-vegan companies, I have a different set of slides to those I show to a room full of vegan business owners. The seminar to vegans will be twice as long also – not because I’m holding anything back from the execs (he hastily adds in case any of them read this!) but because I know you will really understand and connect with what I can teach you.
I also truly believe in you. That’s important from anyone you are learning from. To me, you are not just a number in a spreadsheet or a demographic I don’t understand – you are part of my tribe. I’ve seen how successful vegan businesses can be when they get their offering and marketing right, so I have written this course assuming you’re going to succeed too.
