Morality has a Branding Problem: The Tragedy of Vegan Meat Brands
Key points regarding vegan meats and the trouble with moral branding:
Vegan Meat brands, most notably Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, have fallen from their 2019 highs. The issue has nothing to do with their alternative meat products
Instead, the issue with vegan meats is owed primarily to how they’re branded, which places the company’s moral claims at the core of their brand personality.
This is a mistake, as morality itself has a huge branding problem: Morality is diametrically opposed to the essential goals of branding.
In 2019, vegan meat brands were riding high, poised to disrupt the $1T American meat industry. When Beyond Meat (BYND) went public in May, its stock popped to the tune of 160 percent, marking the most impressive single-day performance for any major American company. That same year, Barclays forecasted that the alternative meat market would reach $140 billion by 2030. Boston Consulting Group was even more bullish, claiming the market would be more than double that by 2035.
And for a few years, this projection looked spot on. The overall demand for plant-based meat products also saw a substantial increase, with sales growing by 74 percent from 2018 to 2021. The future felt predestined: alternative meat was here.
As we now know, this future never materialized. Beyond Meat’s stock (BYND) is down over 85% from its high in 2020. Its revenue continues to sink, down 37% year over year, in 2023. The industry as a whole has seen massive losses. Its closest competitor, Impossible Foods, has been forced to lay off over a quarter of its staff.
So what went wrong? As we’ll see, the fall of vegan meats is what happens when you attempt to mix branding with morality. Morality has a serious branding problem.
The Tragic Fall of Vegan Meat Brands
In a prominent piece for Bloomberg entitled, Fake Meat Was Supposed to Save the World. It Became Just Another Fad, Deena Shanker chronicles the fall of alternative meats in exquisite detail. As the name suggests, vegan meats, in their hay day, were a novelty buy. They were buoyed by hype, hope, and the shifts in consumer behavior brought on by the pandemic. For the median American consumer in 2020, there’s only so many times you can switch it up between chicken, and beef. Bored with the humdrum of the same grocery list, and the same routines day in and day out, trying out one of these vegan meats was a welcome break from routine.
This was a massive opportunity for vegan meat brands. Unfortunately, however, the vegan-meat curious did not become vegan-meat loyalists. In March 2022, the Canadian food company Maple Leaf published a review of the US plant-based category. The review revealed that while many people were interested in trying meat alternatives, only a small percentage of those customers became repeat buyers. When life returned to normal, and the median consumer had already an “ah, what the heck” novelty plant-based meal or two, these brands simply did not have the staying power. Their glory days now seem like a distant memory.
But why? Were consumers that unhappy with the product? Why couldn’t these brands retain their popularity, and pioneer this future? The issue wasn’t with their product, primarily. Instead, these companies have a much deeper branding problem.
Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and The Failure of Moral Branding
The percentage of vegans and vegetarians has stayed flat at about 17% over the past 30 years. To be a successful vegan meat brand, the brand needs to appeal to people who aren’t already vegetarians or vegans. This was always the ambition of these companies. As Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown, told The New Yorker, “ We want to take a double-digit portion of the beef market. We’re going to send meat into a death spiral.”
Do these brands match these ambitions? A resounding “no”.
First, there’s nothing distinct about either of them. Both brands are completely interchangeable. If you were to come up to a random person on the street, and ask them if they had heard of Impossible Foods, they’d probably say, “Oh yeah, they’re that fake meat company”, and couldn’t say a second thing about them. If you were to come up to a random person on the street, and ask them if they had heard of Beyond Meat, they’d probably say, “Oh yeah, they’re that fake meat company”, and couldn’t say a second thing about them.
Beyond Meat came first, in 2009. Founded by Ethan Brown, whose idea was to use plant-based protein to create a piece of food that cooked, smelled, and tasted indistinguishable from meat. Pat Brown (no relation) came along a decade later and founded Impossible Foods. His approach was to create a meat alternative by using heme - an iron-based compound that exists primarily in meats, but also to a lesser extent in plants. His idea was to use heme from plants, but in a much higher concentration, to create a plant-based meat alternative that tasted and acted like meat. Later, he discovered a way to produce it at scale using genetically modified yeast, which gives it its “bloodiness”.
Two very different approaches, and two different kinds of vegan-meat products. To the median consumer though, each brand is just as good (or not) as the other.
Placing Morality at the Core of The Brand Personality
As relatively new brands, they should be applauded for achieving a strong level of awareness. But beyond a recognition of their existence, there’s very little instantiation of meaning. For each brand, there’s nearly complete lack of brand personality.
The lack of effective branding is not for lack of trying. In their pre-pandemic hay day, both of the Browns hit the TED talk circuit, and a host of other top-end PR to vouch for their brands. As any marketer knows, a vocal, likable CEO can do wonders for a young company’s brand-building efforts. Front and center in their messaging: morality.
Pat Brown (Impossible Foods) focused specifically on the environmental aspect of the meat industry. The natural environment, he argued, could not sustain a global population with such an insatiable demand for meat. He discussed the “wildlife holocaust” at the hands of the meat industry; an animal genocide that is coming directly from society’s unwavering demand for beef. Alternative meat was here to put an end to this.
Ethan Brown (Beyond Meat) was even more moralistic. For him, it wasn’t merely that meat was destroying the world’s natural habitats - through factory farming, it was also torturing animals in the process. He also broadened the argument against meat to human health concerns, claiming that some of our most pressing health maladies, including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease were the direct result of our overreliance on meat. Morality has been a mainstay of Beyond Meat’s marketing. As recently as August, 2023, they launched the “There’s Goodness Here,” campaign, which they describe as “simple, digestible and compelling content that celebrates the goodness present at each step along the way as the company builds its deliciously good plant-based meats that are good for your body, the earth, farmers, and animals”.
To be sure, humanity’s reliance on meat does pose serious harm to the environment, to human health, and of course, to animals themselves. These are serious issues. Developing a product that can, ostensibly, solve these problems is a very good idea. And from a business standpoint, creating a brand around this product that reflects these moral attributes seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy. But it’s not. The strategy is an abject failure.
This brings us to where we began: It’s a fatal mistake to mix morality and branding.
Morality has a Branding Problem
It’s not that vegan meat, as a category, is difficult to brand. The branding problem lies with morality itself.
Morality is about the greater responsibility you have towards other people, other sentient creatures, and the planet. It requires hard-earned, unpleasant, and deliberate thought. Morality is about cultivating a clear, defensible, ethical code, and it’s about comporting one’s behaviors to be in line with this code - often sacrificing personal pleasures in the process. Collectively, these ethical principles also allow us to create laws, institutions, and social norms to safeguard our well-being.
This is all incredibly important. And none of it is sexy. Nobody ever looked at something, and thought - you know what would make this more desirable, more enticing, and more alluring? Some quotes from Peter Singer. In the history of human courtship, no one has ever been swept off their feet by a date talking about moral philosophy.
Moral questions are some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves. But none of it is the stuff of branding magic. Situating moral claims within the architecture of a brand is like trying to seduce someone by asking them what they would do in the Shallow Pond thought experiment.
How Brands with Moral Products Can Create Effective Brands
These tough conversations about responsibility can be had, and the company can strive to contribute to the greater good. But it shouldn’t be within the brand itself. Recall that the brand is not the company, but an externally facing tool of the corporation which has a very specific set of goals: to identify the company’s products, to differentiate itself from the competition, and to add unique value above and beyond the products themselves.
All of these goals require the brand to resonate with its market. It requires a brand personality that is unique, and attractive, and which inspires affection, gusto, and adoration. And most crucially, the brand need not directly reflect the moral aims of the company itself.
With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at a fake meat brand that’s left its morality at the door - at least from a branding standpoint. As a result, it’s taking the industry by storm, and in the fullness of time, it may be the one to ultimately pioneer this meat-free future. The brand in question? Slutty Vegan
Photo by Austin Santaniello via UnSplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for Fake Meats as a Window into Moral Branding
Beyond Meat, Press Release (Aug, 2023) “There’s Goodness Here”
Reynolds, M. (Aug, 2023) Fake Meat Is Bleeding, but It’s Not Dead Yet, Wired
Thompson, D. (Feb, 2023) The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Fake Meat in America, The Ringer
