Understanding the vegan journey

I was at an event with about 400 other vegans.  The speaker asked everyone in the room to put their hand up if they first went vegan to improve their own health, not because of the animals.  About 60% of the room put their hands in the air, including myself.  He then asked people to keep their hands in the air if they were now vegan for the animals.  Not a single hand went down.  This is the key thing you need to embrace when understanding vegan consumers: no matter where people are on their journey right now (they might just be reducing their meat and dairy intake or choosing cosmetics that have the Leaping Bunny symbol) their journey is usually one way.  Few people jump straight to vegan overnight.  They begin with trying meat alternatives because they know it’s healthier, or trying being vegan for ‘Veganuary’ for a single month.  It doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t first go vegan for the animals because you can be safe in the knowledge that there is an ever-growing army of vegan activists, bloggers and YouTubers just waiting to pounce whilst someone is searching on YouTube for how to make vegan mayonnaise.

One of the reasons behind the rise in veganism over the past few years is because we live in a world of complex yet dumb digital algorithms.  As soon as YouTube, Google and Facebook notice that someone is taking an interest in veganism (by the searches they’re doing on those platforms), they will start to put more vegan content in front of that person.  The algorithms are not yet smart enough to realise someone is only looking at plant-based for their health.  Instead, they will suggest articles and videos that are popular amongst vegans in general, which will include a lot of ethical realities about how the food we eat gets to our plate.

It is this journey that many businesses don’t understand and leads to poor customer engagement with vegans.  No matter how experienced you are with marketing and selling, the vegan sector is entirely different to any you might have sold to before because every single plant-based consumer is a moving target: their buying behaviour changes radically over time.  Think back to your own journey into veganism.  Someone very early on in their vegan journey might be happy to order the plant-based option from a fast-food burger restaurant.  Six months later, that very same consumer might feel a physical revulsion at the thought of walking through the door.  What has changed?  The product hasn’t changed.  The price hasn’t changed.  It’s the consumer’s knowledge that has changed.  This is really disastrous for businesses who don’t understand the vegan customer.  Different types of consumers tend to be nicely predictable and stick to buying the same types of products based on their demographic (their age, where they live, what their job it etc.).  You can guess what brands a teenage girl will likely buy and what brands a 40-year-old man will engage with.  In no other sector can those two swap places overnight – but these radical shifts in buying behaviour happen all the time with vegans, as someone learns a new piece of information about how a product is made or how an industry is run.