Plant-based vs vegan
This is why sometimes people refer to plant-based products instead of vegan. They are products that are suitable for vegans, but their main marketplace are people who have maybe not made the ethical connection yet and would not call themselves vegan, even if what they eat all comes from plants.
You might be thinking: ‘But I want to sell to other vegans!’ and that is amazing and awesome and you are the future – but you need to be aware of the size of the market for your products if you only sell to that (growing) 1%. If you are selling a meat-replacement product for instance, then you have the entire ‘plant-based’ marketplace to sell to. Your product will be attractive to meat-reductionists, vegetarians, flexitarians, pescatarians and those that are vegan for health, the environment as well as those that are vegan for the animals; taken all together, the people identifying as those might make up half of the population. This is why you see companies using ‘plant-based’ on their products, or they might put ‘suitable for vegans’ in small writing at the bottom of the ingredients list. They know vegans will be scrutinising the ingredients list but they are aiming at the wider consumer who doesn’t yet identify as vegan.
If instead you sell hand-crafted vegan soap aimed at fellow vegans, as amazing as your product is, your available customer base is going to be much smaller and you need to be ready for that. This is why so many fabulous small vegan companies struggle to get off the ground yet more ethically-questionable mainstream brands are seeing huge growth. It’s a much more crowded marketplace and only the truly remarkable brands that manage to stand out against the background noise find real success.
And there’s a real lesson to be learnt there – your company needs to be truly remarkable. Not just good. Not just something your friends like. You need to be the sort of company that makes someone drop their coffee when they first encounter you and then they can’t live without you. We’re going to come back to that later.
As you build a clear picture of who you are selling to you need to know who the potential customers are for your product or service. Start by looking at the whole plant-based market and circle the customers who your product is appropriate for. Is it the whole marketplace or is it just people who identify as vegan? If you have more than one product, then for each one mark which areas of the market it covers. Is there a gap in your product range? Are your products in their current state only going to connect with people who are ethically vegan? Or is there an opportunity to bring out a new product, or re-package an existing one, so that someone who is just looking to buy less animal-based products will also be more likely to buy from you?
Don’t be disheartened if the whole reason you started your business was to further the vegan cause and help to give vegans a better product or service. If you feel like you would have to change your ethics to sell to a wider market then you’ve not understood the journey your customers are on. The reason many of the big brands get vegan so wrong is because they don’t understand ‘the vegan journey’.
