Positioning your product to match your customer’s vegan journey
Once you understand where your customer is on their vegan journey, you can position the marketing messages you use and the products you develop to connect with them. This is why Blondes Cruelty-Free Cafe in Humberside, UK, don’t call themselves a ‘vegan cafe’. They understand that many of their customers are looking to spend ethically. At times it can seem as though everyone has an argument against why you should be vegan, but it’s hard to argue against wanting to be ‘cruelty-free’. A customer may not be vegan themselves, but if they know their money is going towards causing less harm in the world they will happily support that. Also, it gives the owners of Blondes (who are long-term vegan activists themselves) a platform to engage the wider public when their customers ask what they mean by a cruelty-free cafe? Why are other cafes NOT cruelty-free? Really? Well, that gives me something to think on the next time I’m ordering my usual latte – perhaps I’ll swap out the dairy for almond milk next time. Result!
Now I know I’ve got you all fired up and thinking about how you’re going to ditch all your vegan messages and launch a new range of bleeding vegan steaks. Well, unfortunately it’s not quite that simple.
We have identified that our vegan customers are on a journey – remember we said that a new vegan convert might be happy to drop into their local burger drive-through, order the plant-based option and hold the mayo? Well, usually, they don’t stay that way for long. Think back to your own journey into veganism. What products did you first buy that you would never buy now? Think about someone who hasn’t eaten meat for several years, are they really going to want to buy a meat replacement product which is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, or will they have a physical reaction at the thought of something that close? If someone lives a fully vegan lifestyle, they may be in support of businesses who are bringing out products to help convert more people to veganism, but are less likely to buy those products themselves. They want to engage with companies who are catering just for them. They care deeply that over 200,000,000 land animals will be killed today and they want companies to help them do something about it. They want to buy the Viva-La-Vegan ‘Rebel With A Cause’ hoodie and do everything they can to support businesses who visibly support their own ethics. As the vegan market matures the pool of ‘for the animals’ vegans continues to increase, and they are also likely to become your most loyal customers and followers.
So, now you know all about this changing vegan buying behaviour, what do you do with this knowledge? You put it into practice for your business, that’s what.
Because people have completely different motivations depending on where they are on their vegan journey, the same marketing message won’t work for everyone. So, if you are indeed trying to connect with everyone, then you either have to change your message depending on who you are talking to, or you must have different products that will be attractive at different stages of people’s journey. This is why huge global companies own brands that seem to compete with each other. Unilever own both Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum because they know that one brand will attract one demographic (or type of customer) and one brand another. Both these brands have successfully launched plant-based ice-creams – but the message you will see on the vegan Ben & Jerry’s is completely different to the one you will see on the vegan Magnum. Yet both are owned by the same company. Clever or sneaky?
You can do the same. You could actually go as far as launching a second brand that you will know will connect with health-based vegans, or you might just change your marketing messages to not exclude people who have gone vegan for their environmental concerns.
Exercise: mapping how your vegan message connects
This chart shows several possible stages on someone’s vegan journey. They are not exhaustive: people don’t all start at the same place and some people will jump a stage. You might also have identified your own step on the vegan journey that is unique to your product, for example when someone who is vegan decides to move away from plastic to more ethical packaging.
Work your way along and write down what kind of marketing messages they will most connect with about your product at that stage of their journey. You might think that your product just won’t be of interest to these people, and that’s the point of this exercise. It might not be, so you can stop wasting your time trying to sell it to them. But more likely you will be able to change your product, or the way you present it, so that they will feel it’s more for them. If you sell more than one product or service, write down which of your products will also most likely connect with them. For example:
- You make vegan clothing. How do you connect with people who have turned vegan for their fitness? Can you bring in a new line that will be attractive to the people who are at the fitness stage of their vegan journey? Training tops that say ‘plant-powered muscle’ instead of ‘vegan athlete’ for example. Again, don’t think you’re diluting your message by dropping the word ‘vegan’. Get them to be one of your loyal customers by connecting with them first, then help them move along their journey second.
- You are a vegan website designer. How do you connect with people who have turned vegan for environmental reasons? Start to think about the energy that huge data centres consume. What can you do about that? Can you educate and promote website hosts that have less impact on the environment? Can you build a calculator that shows what environmental impact the average company website has every year, and then create a package that off-sets the energy used to host it?
- You make the most kick-ass vegan cupcakes in your hood. I mean, the kind that you would literally crawl over someone’s grandmother to get the last one. How do you connect with people who are vegan activists when you are all about taste and sugar-goodness? This is where you can really prove your vegan credentials. You can create a message that says you might seem like a cupcake fairy on the surface, but just like your cakes, bite a bit deeper and you are going to be hit with an explosion of vegan goodness. Your mission is to change the world by showing the unsuspecting public that dairy is completely unnecessary. You can be the person distributing free cakes to keep the energy going at your local vegan protest. Launch a new recipe just for your local vegan meet-up.
You see how this works? Most likely, you are looking at your customers through a single lens, probably the same lens you look though yourself at life. But plant-based consumers are infinitely diverse, and once you are aware of this you can double, triple and even quadruple the amount of people your product is going to attract.
