Don’t build a business, start a movement

As well as understanding why your customers don’t buy, you also need to know why customers are attracted to you.  To build a successful business, you need a group of followers who absolutely cannot live without your product and believe in your company’s mission to their core.  These people will help spread your message and attract more people who also love what you are doing.  They will become your ‘tribe’.

For some companies this can be difficult.  If you sell stationery, how can you build a tribe around you of people who love pens and staplers and will act as your free marketing team?  It can be done, but you have to do it by stealing someone else’s following – such as licencing Hello Kitty or Harry Potter to put on the end of your pencils.  If you have a vegan business however, you are already part of a global group of people who are brought together by a single cause. That doesn’t mean they will automatically love what you are doing, but you have a point of commonality to ask them to join you on your mission to make the world a better place.

If your company’s cause is worthy enough, it can give people a huge reason to spend money with you instead of a competitor.  Take who you buy your electricity from, have you given it much thought?  Have you made an ethical choice or have you just gone with whoever the price comparison site said was the cheapest?  Because, well, it’s hard to get excited about buying electricity.

That is, unless, you buy your electricity from Ecotricity, the world’s first vegan energy supplier founded by life-long environmentalist and green industrialist Dale Vince.  This is an electricity company that promotes a sustainable and vegan world, makes sure that none of its energy is generated using animal derivatives (you would be surprised that some is) and carries the logos of vegan charities such as Sea Shepherd, Viva! and The Vegan Society on their website footer.  They have taken an everyday commodity that most of us don’t think about and created a movement around it.  And the best thing is, as a consumer you don’t even need to change how or what you are consuming.  You just choose to give your money to support a company who aligns with your core beliefs.

Already having a vegan businesses means you are already on a mission, but finding 10 people who 100% identify with your product, your brand, and will remain your customers and brand champions for years is worth more than finding 50 people who make a one-off purchase.  Again, this all comes back to your business being remarkable in some way.  Take the earlier example of Kings Grooming who decided to launch their mission to help men talk about their mental health alongside producing aftershave. Your mission will really touch some people, and you can build a group of advocates who believe in your goal and want to see you succeed.  Bring these people into your inner circle, ask if they will record a message for your website to help you find more happy customers, ask if they will do a Facebook live feed with you to help you with your mission.  Get them onto your testing panel and make them brand ambassadors.

When people ask me how to find more customers I always tell them to concentrate on building a tribe first.  It’s why we called Vegan Business Tribe what we did.  Go back far enough and all of our ancestors will have lived in tribal groups.  From the Celtic tribes of Scotland to the prehistoric communities that roamed across Europe and all the major continents, people banded together in groups for safety, for a share of prosperity, or around a common belief and way of life.  But someone in your ‘tribe’ no longer has to live in the cave or hut next to you – that person could be anywhere in the world but believe in the same things that you do.

And if you haven’t got a mission, now is the time to use your business to start a movement.  The reason most of us launch a vegan business is because we want to make a change in the world.  To make that change you need to attract followers.  To attract followers you need to have an idea at your core that will band people together.  That might be a big thing (moving the world to green and cruelty-free energy like Dale Vince) or a small thing (giving people the most cruelty-free sugar fix possible like Mummy Meagz), but when you connect that idea with the right people you can create a movement of people who want to see you succeed.  If you are just selling products then it’s much harder to convince people you are in this for the right reasons.