Defining your vegan brand voice
Every company should have something to say, and what your company says (and how it says it) is called your ‘brand voice’. What that voice will be is defined by who you want to listen to you. Are your customers other vegans who you want to help support after they have made the conversion to veganism, or are you wanting to engage with non-vegans so you can better help them better understand the realities of our relationship with animals? Or do you not care if your customers never turn vegan as long as you are doing something to remove an animal product from the market? Does your company trade on its ethical credentials (and to do that, you actually have to walk the walk – you can’t just SAY you are ethical without doing something above and beyond to prove it), or do you focus on a different core message such as price. Of course, you don’t have to be one or the other; just because a company produces low-cost products doesn’t mean it can’t do so in an ethical way. But have you ever tried to listen to two things being said at the same time? It’s hard to take either thing in, so you need to decide what you are going to say first.
If you study a marketing course, you will come across an exercise known as ‘perceptual mapping’. This is a fancy term for a simple idea of drawing a chart on a sheet of paper and deciding where you want your company to be on that chart. For example, you could have a chart where the X axis (the line going left to right) is price and the Y axis (the line going up and down) is quality, and use this to map how people perceive different car companies. High on both the X and Y axis at the same time (so they would appear in the top right of the chart) might be Rolls Royce – high on price and quality. Low on the X and Y axis (so they appear bottom left) might be someone like Kia – low on price and quality (sorry if you are a Kia driver!). All the other car companies will be somewhere else in between.
But you can rename the axis of this chart and use it for lots of different positioning exercises, including what kind of vegan business you are or want to be. Draw a line going left to right and label this ‘how vegan the customers are’. Draw a second line going top to bottom that crosses your first line in the middle, and label this ‘trying to create more vegans’. We can now drop companies onto this chart, including our own, and use this to define what our brand voice needs to say.
Going back to the examples above, Blonde’s Cruelty-Free Cafe know that many of their customers are not vegan, but they are run by long-term vegan activists who use the cafe to educate more people about our relationship with food. So they can be placed top left on the chart.
Gü Puds are not a vegan company, they instead have identified a market trend. This means they are aiming to sell at vegans or plant based consumers, but are not trying to convert people. So they go bottom right on the chart.
Viva La Vegan are a passionately vegan company, who sell clothes to vegans to help them walk around the world with pro-vegan messages emblazoned on their t-shirts. They sell to vegans to help them turn more people vegan, so they go top right on our chart.
This leaves the bottom left area to fill, and this is where no vegan company wants to land! This is where a company isn’t trying to sell to vegans and doesn’t care about the vegan cause, so most likely their product is accidentally vegan. Oreos is an example of this – they accidentally became a vegan icon without ever marketing themselves at vegan consumers, and if reading this is the first time you’ve heard that Oreos chocolate biscuits are suitable for vegans, you can thank me later!
So, now you need to decide where your company fits on this chart, and once you know this you can define what your brand voice will be. Deciding where on the horizontal (or X) axis of how vegan your customers are should be easy because we’ve already done lots of research into our customers. You should know how vegan they are and how they connect with the vegan message. If you are only selling to vegans you will be to the right, if you are selling to everyone you will be on the left.
Placing yourself on the vertical (or Y) axis of how many new vegans you are tying to create means asking yourself a more difficult question. How is your company helping the vegan cause? Is your company actively helping us move towards a vegan world, or are you happy to make a living from supporting it without contributing towards it? This will make some people pause. Of course you want to put your business high on that axis, but you can’t do that unless your company is actively trying to bring about change. Just being a vegan company or offering a vegan service is not enough to put yourself on the top half of this chart.
Many of us set out to launch a vegan business because just BEING vegan was not enough. We want to go further to do something about the injustices we see, but with all the time and effort it takes to run a business we can forget what drove us to start it in the first place. Ask Willow who runs Blondes Cruelty-free Eatery how many people she thinks they have converted to veganism over the years and she will tell you “loads!”. Ask a customer of Viva La Vegan if wearing one of their tops with a vegan slogan on has ever led to an opportunity to talk about why they are vegan with a non-vegan, and all will say yes. Can you say that about your business? Can you prove a direct link to what you do and the reduction of animal deaths and cruelty? Can you say that by setting up your company you are actively bringing more people to veganism? If you want to put yourself in the top half of this chart then you can’t unless you can answer yes to those questions – at the best you are in the middle.
Once you have placed your company on the chart (and it doesn’t have to be directly in one of the four quarters, it can be anywhere on the sheet) you can use this to plan what your vegan brand voice will lead with:
- Top left: lead with ‘plant-based’ and ethics in your marketing, instead of talking about veganism.
- Top right: lead with your campaigning, make your brand overtly vegan and embrace the vegan world.
- Bottom right: lead with sustainability and lessening your impact on the world.
- Bottom left: make no mention of veganism or plant-based at all, apart from saying your product may be suitable for vegans.
Mapping your company on this chart may also make you want to move where you currently are on it. For example, you might have set out to be top right (selling to vegans and making more people turn vegan) but find your actually slap-bang in the middle of the chart. You are selling to vegans and non-vegans alike and you can’t directly claim to be increasing the number of herbivores in the world. That might be fine for where you want to be as a company, but for others it may give the push to change their company’s brand voice. If you want to push into the top half of the chart then make sure at some point in dealing with you that your customers get educated on our relationship with animals. Or you might want to donate some of your time for free to vegan causes and let your customers know about that. And your brand voice will follow.
Will Saunders is a vegan branding expert who runs Good Will Studios in West Yorkshire, UK. When he runs a half-day brand workshop with a company he asks a series of questions to help you define your vegan brand voice, which allows him to create a visual design that matches your company’s ethics. One great question he asks on his ‘Find Your Brand Voice’ worksheet is to imagine that your company has a famous brand ambassador. This is an actor, musician, campaigner, sporting star etc., who shares the values of your organisation and you would love to have to promote your business. Who would that be? Would it be vegan Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton? Or vegan Grammy-award winning vegan pop-musician Billie Eilish? Once you have decided who your imaginary brand ambassador is, this can help you define the style of your company. If this was Heather Mills’ company, what would the message on our homepage be, what would we be talking about in our tweets, and how would it be different compared with if it was campaigner Joey Carbstrong’s business?
