Veganising your current brand
Unless you were born to vegan parents, there will have been a point in your life when you first turned vegan and had to assess a lot of things around you. There is a possibility that you already had a business when you changed. This is what happened with Lisa and I. We were already running a successful marketing and business growth agency, I had a second ambassador role with The Chartered Institute of Marketing and was working with huge companies across different time zones. When we turned vegan, which we did together, we didn’t really think about our company, it just made catering a bit more difficult (I still remember being served fish as the vegan option at a black-tie dinner at Westminster). But it was at a talk we attended by our (now) good friend John Awen at a local vegan fair that set us on a different course.
John is the journeyman of vegan activists, and he gave 54 talks over 52 weekends the year we heard him speak. All of these were mainly at local vegan fairs, mostly unpaid, and often to a handful of people at a time. We’d never heard of John at the time (it was long before he’d been picked up and featured by the likes of Lad Bible) and we almost didn’t sit in on his talk. But we’d just finished our walk around the stalls as his talk was starting and thought we’d take it as an opportunity to sit down and eat the vegan chocolates we’d just bought which were almost bursting out of the paper bag. But John is a persuasive speaker. He’s responsible for setting more people out on their vegan path than anyone else I know, and a single line he said changed the course of our career. It was: “Just being vegan isn’t enough.”
Lisa and I sat for a long time talking to each other after John finished, our vegan chocolate long forgotten. We were humbled by the scale of animal deaths, the 3 billion animals that had been killed today as we wandered around our local fair sniffing vegan candles. John was right, just being vegan wasn’t enough – we had to do something else to help. But we already had (more than) full time jobs, how could we make a real difference? Well, we had very specialist skillsets that we’d built up over 20 year-long careers. Surely we could use those to better help the vegan cause.
And from speaking to a lot of vegan entrepreneurs and business owners, our story is not unique. They may not have heard John Awen speak, but something will have triggered them to realise they could be putting their skills to a more worthy cause. Some people decided to start over. That’s what Lisa and I did – we launched a new agency helping companies in the vegan sector. But others kept their current company and veganised it. You might not be able to afford to just sack all your current customers and start again, and usually there is no need to. If you have a profitable current client base that you want to keep, then do your customer research and relaunch your brand in such a way that doesn’t alienate them. Sell it as an ‘ethical relaunch’ instead of a vegan one. Keep your company name but put some visual identifiers in your brand so vegan consumers will know you are talking to them. Put the Ⓥ or 
symbol in your LinkedIn profile. Or you might look to launch a new brand on the side and run the two together. Let your current customers fund you moving to a vegan business. Stop looking for new customers for your current business and focus instead on finding them for your vegan arm until such a time where the vegan company can stand on its own.
Going back to our earlier ‘vegan mapping’ exercise, what can you introduce that might expose your non-vegan customers to a conversation about veganism? Are you going to launch new vegan products and services that they will accept as an extension of what you do at the moment, or can you start talking about the animal shelter that your company is now backing and encourage them to join you in helping such a worthy establishment?
