Beyond Meat is Wasting Its Advertising
By: Tobias Benton-Vergo
Tags: Plant Based, Food, Advertising, Strategy, Marketing

What Can We Learn From This?

As marketers, we often look at disasters for lessons about what not to do. But I think missed opportunities are just as ripe to pluck lessons in strategy from.

There are three lessons I think we can learn from Beyond:

1. Different kinds of competition require different kinds of marketing

If plant-based meat wasn’t growing at the rate it is, Beyond’s ad might be more effective. But the reality is, the level of competition in the category is insanely high, and while Beyond has somewhat of a lead, they are by no means comfortable.

Marketing is always context-dependent, and different brands exist in different competitive contexts. It’s important to understand the speed at which a category is competing — how fast can competitors launch, scale, and gain popularity — as well as how consumers relate to the category.

One problem all plant-based meats face, for example, is the novelty of their offering: Because for many consumers plant-based meats are a kind of experiment, something they try out of curiosity, there’s a built-in expectation that they’ll want to sample other plant-based products too.

We therefore can’t assume brand loyalty will work the same way it does with other categories — which is part of the problem with Beyond’s ad. Rather than creating an emotional relationship with their specific brand, it encourages consumers to try plant-based meat in general.

2. The best thing about a product isn’t always the best way to sell it

In a vacuum, Beyond’s TV spot clearly highlights the best, most salient features of the brand’s products. But because these aren’t unique qualities, highlighting them is essentially doing the legwork for their competitors.

This can be tricky for marketers, because when there are benefits as clear, quantifiable, and timely as Beyond Meat offers, it almost feels like malpractice to overlook them and focus, say, on the brand’s story or the specific taste of the product.

Thought of another way, though, this could act as the kind of creative constraint that produces great work. A good exercise, particularly for copywriters and strategists, might simply be to take a brand and say, “how would I sell this if I weren’t allowed to talk about the best thing about it?”

You might even find that there’s a much more interesting angle being obscured by whatever the obvious selling point is.

3. It’s not enough to have an advantage — you have to use the opportunity to consolidate it

The truth is, I’m being pretty hard on Beyond’s marketing here. There’s nothing wrong with their ad — it’s produced nicely, and as a big plant-based advocate, I find it moving.

It’s really more disappointment than anything; rather than using their status to do something creative and exciting, they seem to have gone the “safe” route, producing the kind of ad you’d expect, saying all the obvious things.

As the most visible plant-based brand, Beyond had an opportunity to consolidate their lead by doing something their competitors would struggle to follow. But what they’ve done actually makes it easier for their competitors to step up and distinguish themselves.

It also doesn’t bode well for future challenges the plant-based category will face marketing to new consumers; if the E.U. goes ahead with its proposed ban on the use of meat-related terms for plant-based foods, brands like Beyond will have a creative mountain to climb reaching consumers in those countries — countries where brands like Beyond should otherwise be an obvious hit.