Creating a difference other than ‘vegan’
There was a time when being a vegan company, or having a vegan product, used to be enough to make you remarkable. Now, I’m afraid that boat has left the harbour.
Go back in time even by a mere five years and just finding a vegan burger in a supermarket was reason enough to buy it, and even take a photo of it and share it with your vegan friends. Talk to anyone who has been vegan for more than ten years and they will tell you how they had to drive 10 miles to their nearest health-food store to buy soy milk, or how they had to find obscure niche retailers to buy their vegan products. Once they found these hidden vegan products they would buy in bulk and be customers for life! Now, you can go into any supermarket and you might have your pick of 5 different brands of vegan burger – your product just ‘being vegan’ is no longer unique.
I was recently contacted by a Canadian plant-milk manufacturer asking for our advice on entering the UK market. They had heard that the vegan scene was really growing in the UK and thought their product would be the perfect fit. Lisa and I hopped in the car and headed to our nearest supermarket and took this photograph. I count 44 different plant milks in all in one aisle.
We sent the photo back to them asking exactly what was so remarkable about their product that it would be able to fight its way onto this shelf. In terms of saturation, having several dominant brands in one food sector isn’t unusual for non-vegan foods, and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for more. However, it does mean you now really need to have something unique to stand out.
Living in our vegan bubbles, this is something that we can forget: your product or service just being vegan is no longer remarkable. In 2019, almost one in four new food products carried a vegan claim. So if ‘being vegan’ is what you are relying on to make your product stand out then you’re at least 5 years too late. To succeed you need to have a real point of difference. The more energy you spend creating something genuinely unique about what you are selling, then the easier everything that comes next will be. If you don’t, then a customer will always be buying on price; if they can’t see a real difference between you and a competitor they will just buy whichever is cheapest.
I’ve had this conversation with people and they can come back saying: “Yeah, but there isn’t anything unique about what I do. It’s just a standard product – how can I make THAT remarkable?”. If this is your thought then look at the most successful brands right now – what do they actually do? Usually nothing that exciting. They sell cups of coffee, they make food, they sell shoes to go on your feet, but they set out to do it in a remarkable way. You can do the same, no matter what you sell.
Take plastic storage boxes for example.
I know. Could I have chosen a less remarkable product? Would you think there could be anything remarkable about a plastic box? I bet that whatever you sell is 100 times more exciting. If ever there was a product destined to be a race to who could make them the cheapest, this is it. If you’re constantly dancing around the kitchen whipping up vegan goodies like Lisa does, then you will likely own an entire armoury of plastic containers. You probably picked them up at the supermarket over the years or put them in your trolley when you were out shopping for something else entirely. Few people head out to buy plastic containers, you certainly wouldn’t make an occasion of it. When we do buy a plastic container we want to spend as little as possible because, well, it’s an airtight plastic box. Some might be a nice colour, or look like they are extra airtight because they have clasps on the side, but at the end of the day we’re usually just going to pick up the cheapest.
Now enter the Tupperware salesperson. If you are not familiar with Tupperware, they also make plastic boxes but theirs can cost £20 each. They will tell you that their box is better, more airtight, stack better and all the rest – but is that really going to convince you to part with £20 for a single container when you might be able to find a multi-pack of 10 from your local shop for half that price? Of course not. On paper it looks like it’s a company doomed to fail; make a product that thousands of manufacturers make and sell for next to nothing and charge ten times as much. But what we’re forgetting is Tupperware’s massive point of difference, so big that they make over $2 billion worth of sales a year: you can’t buy Tupperware in a shop. Wait, what?
Tupperware’s salesforce is an army of agents who are usually part-time, usually female, socially well-connected, and who sell to their friends, contacts and local community by holding Tupperware parties. The host will provide food and make it into a social gathering, and while you are sipping your drinks and eating the cake they will show you how great the product is. If you have agreed to come to the party, that’s as good as agreeing to buy! This person might be a friend, or a friend of a friend after all. They have invited you into their home and given you free cake, how can you leave without buying at least one product even though it’s at an elevated price?
In this format, the product is secondary. Yes it needs to be a good product, but the thing that makes Tupperware remarkable is not what they make but how it’s sold and their business model. If you’re a Tupperware agent you can make just as much money recruiting other agents underneath you – to the point where you no longer have to sell the products yourself. This model is not unique, and you will also find it in the vegan market with Tropic Skincare. Tropic make vegan and cruelty free skincare and cosmetics and are backed by business millionaire Alan Sugar. You only have to spend a short time mixing with other vegans before you will be approached by someone selling Tropic – either to invite you to their next pamper party where you will be given a demo of Tropic products or to offer you a new business opportunity to make some extra money part time. That opportunity is to become a Tropic sales agent yourself.
So, you might have said that you can’t come up with a point of difference for your product or service other than it just being vegan, but it might not be the product itself that is your difference. It might be how you sell it, what you do with the money you make from it, or what problem your product solves for someone. Let’s look at some more (mostly) vegan companies who have also created a difference in what they do to be remarkable.
