The Topline IED Awaiting Mission-Driven Brands

Mission-driven brands were starting every hour, it seemed, back in the 2010s. Wall Street and PE threw billions at these businesses, especially plant-based meat and dairy. The pattern across most of them was a morally strident founder trying to ‘change the world’ by scaling their business. 

It was not new. This mission-driven brand movement began in the 1980s with the organic foods movement. The 2010s were just the second wave. Whether upcycling, reducing meat consumption, or something else, the problem remains the same for stewards of these businesses.

Most consumers don’t buy consumer products for ideological reasons, i.e., primarily to support social change movements. They buy them for highly pragmatic purposes related to fairly mundane everyday life concerns.

Any sustainability ‘halo’ mapped onto a mission-driven brand supports a) curiosity trial and b) retention. The latter is useful in stabilizing your velocity growth rate. The former, though, is potentially a disaster, as Beyond Meat discovered by spiking revenue to around $450M before its decline ensued in 2021.  An ongoing decline. Attracting a bunch of curiosity trials is what ideologically provocative businesses often do.

Why?

Because it takes very little for an aspirationally motivated consumer to buy one pack of a mission-driven brand as a sort of political vote for the cause. This ‘vote,’ however, does not change the dynamics of getting them to repeat purchases and remain a consumer for years to come. This is how dramatic PR for mission-driven brands can spike trial and set off a topline IED.