Understanding entry points to veganism
There are many different entry points to veganism.
Following a number of high-profile athletes and bodybuilders turning to a plant-based diet, from Schwarzenegger to Venus Williams, and the success of The Game Changers movie about the increase in sports performance from plant-based protein, personal trainers around the world found themselves inundated from people asking about its benefits. The World Health Organisation’s official guidance for a healthy lifestyle currently recommends eating “a nutritious diet based on a variety of foods originating mainly from plants, rather than animals.” There is little or no ethics presented alongside this advice; you wouldn’t say that Game Changers is a ‘vegan’ documentary. Instead, the message is simply: if you want to train better or live longer then eat plants.
It’s important that you identify the motivations of people who have turned to a plant-based diet for health reasons, and what messages about your product are going to successfully hit home with them. These people haven’t (yet) made the full ethical connection between the food on their plate and the animal in a cage. They have been driven by achieving faster run ‘splits’, having more endurance, or building muscle like Arnie’s! So, if you approach these vegans with the same ethical messages that resonate with you, and tell them that by buying your product or service they are saving lives, they will quickly tune out and turn off.
However, don’t think that changing your message is diluting your ethics. In tailoring your marketing messages to connect with health-based vegans you are doing something immeasurably important: you are helping people continue their vegan journey. Usually, this journey is a one-way trip. Once you make the connection with how food gets to your plate, how the dairy milk gets to your coffee, or how the cosmetic gets to your skin and the impact it has on animals along the way, there’s no way you can start consuming those products again. But for many, veganism can start off as being just the latest diet, the new fitness craze. So, the longer your company can keep people engaged with vegan products, the more time they have to learn, to be influenced, and to make that crucial ethical connection.
Never look down on selling to customers who have gone vegan for their health. We have spent a lifetime being told we need dairy, meat and fish in our diets to stay healthy. It can be a huge leap to go against centuries of mainstream health education. Understand the huge change someone has just made to go vegan, regardless of their first motivation, and understand how brave they might have had to be to make that change. Understand the ridicule they might have received from their friends and families, and realise that you now telling them that this wasn’t enough and they need to go even further may just set them back. Be confident that the more someone learns about plant-based diets, the more recipes they search for online, the more vegan health videos they watch on YouTube, then the more the algorithm tags them as vegan. It will only be a short time before Earthling Ed, Joey Carbstrong, or Erin Janus’s Dairy is Scary will start to appear in their list of recommended videos to watch next.
You will have heard people say “I could never be vegan because I like X too much”; your product might fill that gap for someone and help them first make that change. That is why ‘like-for-like’ vegan products are so successful. Vegan Mac & Cheez, Vegan Galaxy chocolate bars, Applewood Vegan Cheese, This! Isn’t Bacon, Richmond meat-free sausages – these are all substitute products that show a consumer they can get the same experience they are used to but from plants instead. You can be responsible for helping people to start that journey – if you want to help us move towards a vegan and cruelty-free world then you need to help more people to go and stay vegan. Re-aligning your vegan product so that it’s more attractive to someone who hasn’t yet made the ethical connection isn’t diluting your ethics; it could turn out to be your biggest contribution to the cause. It doesn’t matter if your company has a long history of not being vegan, because people who are new to veganism want the brands they already know to transition with them.
You can apply the same thought process to people who have moved to a plant-based diet for environmental reasons. These are ethically-conscious consumers who want to do what they can to reduce their impact on the planet in many different ways. They already have one foot on the ladder. They are consciously choosing products that use less plastic in their packaging and are customers of companies that have strong ethical policies, so spending money with businesses who are trying to reduce the amount of animal products that are consumed is an obvious fit to their world view.
These are also the customers who will be the most open to vegan products beyond just food. Trying to sell a vegan mattress to someone who has gone vegan for their health and fitness is going to be just as hard as selling one to a meat-eater. However, if you can package your vegan mattress to also be plastic-free, free from harmful chemicals, ethically sourced and manufactured, and have a life-time collection policy to make sure none end up in lay-bys or landfills, then you will connect with not just ethical vegans who want to buy your product (because it doesn’t contain any animal derivatives in the glues, treatment chemicals and fabric) but also environmental vegans whose main motivator is to reduce their impact on the world.
