TOO MANY CONCEPTS SPOIL THE (PLANT-BASED) BROTH: A Thought Leadership Strategy Case Study

First off, a genuine welcome to 2025. My usual go-to this time of year is to write a piece reiterating the importance of Annual Strategy when undertaking Thought Leadership. But this can this get a little repetitious so I thought this year we’d instead create a hypothetical Case Study illustrating why it's so critical to clarify your actual thoughts and, therefore, your actual readership, before leaping into creating Strategy or specific Thought Leadership material.

As we'll see, and especially for ethical or sustainable companies and others driven by a passionate mission, there's a danger of confusing beliefs and values with company thinking: the two are not quite the same and can lead to serious readership conundrums if we are not careful, as well as fervent but ultimately vague attempts at Thought Leadership which fail to set your company apart from others with a similar set of beliefs. As such we've chosen a sector that is both popular (i.e. increasingly competitive) and also emotive: plant-based food.

Despite some blips, this is still very much a growth area and so is both ethical and profitable - our beloved 'win-win'. (The industry also interests me personally, despite not being vegan.) Critically, since the subject provokes impassioned opinions, it creates usefully interesting dilemmas when it comes to Thought Leadership Marketing materials. As such it is an ideal Case Study from which to highlight the difference between 'cause' and 'concept', as well as the danger of conflicting Readerships.

A Mission is Not an Idea

This is obvious but rarely stated: for your company to be Thought Leaders, you need to be leading Thought. This requires you to know exactly what you think as a company in the first place. The problem is that what we often take for our company ‘thoughts’ (Vision or Mission) are less concepts than they are vague, generic wishes, beliefs or dreams.

Many company Mission Statements or Vision Statements, for example, are little more than slogans or mottos dreamed up by a copywriter and are highly unspecific:

-          ‘helping make the world a tastier place’

-          ‘creating sustainable places’

-          ‘because every body is beautiful’

-          ‘towards a plant-based multiverse’ …. You get the idea.

I’ve of course made some of these up and had a little fun with it, but you see the type of thing. And for the purposes of being a motto or strapline there is nothing in fact wrong with them. But for the purpose of Thought Leadership they are almost useless because they are not really thoughts, let alone ideas or concepts. They offer only the vaguest starting point ... and a starting point from which innumerable other companies will also be positioning themselves.

To illustrate just how vague these are – and how unsuitable a basis from which to create meaningful Thought Leadership - let’s look more closely at the last one (albeit rendered more realistic): ‘towards a plant-based world’ and see how that might extrapolate from a Thought Leadership perspective.

Case Study: Towards A Plant-Based World

Now, very many companies (and product lines) today are ‘plant-based’ but what is the specific idea or thinking here, other than being anti-animal products (just like all their Competitors)?

I can think off the top of my head of at least 10 completely different angles based on why you might have created a plant-based company in the first place, and also on the degree of what we might call 'strictness':

For example,

• some (probably most) plant-based / vegan companies (and individuals) are primarily coming from an animal rights perspective; within this, degrees of 'strictness' vary;

• some do it / advocate it primarily for the planet (reducing CO2 emissions);

• some might advocate it as part of wanting to put an end to world hunger / food scarcity;

• some individual vegans are primarily doing it for health reasons;

• some are extremely strict and can’t even eat honey, for example. Some are even more stringent and also cannot eat cashew-based products because cashew farming is known to be dangerous for the workers and they are as much human-centric ethical as vegan;

• some plant-based companies by contrast are pretty loose around their goals and are happy even if only smaller shifts are made (such as many more people eating meat and or animal products fewer times a week).

I’m sure there are very many more positions on this that I don’t know about.

Even these are not concepts of course, they are only 'stances' – but they at least give a sense of what sort of articles/features/papers these companies might produce. Yet where the stance is broad, the concepts can become quite confused – as can the Readerships.

Too Many Concepts Spoil the (Plant Based?) Broth

Let’s now imagine a fairly broad stance whereby this hypothetical company is creating plant-based products partly for the planet and partly from an animal rights perspective. They are also open to customers who only wish to reduce their meat intake (not stop it altogether). There are A LOT of companies like this these days and in all cases their stance or position is along the lines of “any reduction in emissions and reduction in meat consumption is a good thing.”

But given chicken farming creates lower carbon emissions than beef, and very many millions of people will likely refuse point blank to eat less meat, if our only mission is, well, to reduce emissions, then does this mean that chicken, rather, should be being promoted as a viable alternative to beef? That would potentially be more helpful purely from an emissions perspective. But what then about the ethical issues around chicken (and indeed eggs)? Should the concept of importance then be promoting a vast improvement in the ethics of chicken (and egg) farming? This is not absolutely NOT going appeal to vegans! And the price of chicken would go up – yet we want to stop hunger. And what if you are as company yourself create a plant-based chicken substitute product?

All these well-meaning Goals are colliding and even opposing and so what may initially look like Thought Leadership is really more of an idyllic ethical Wish List. It’s quite difficult to create coherent Thought Leadership from, unless of course you produce a lengthy White Paper exploring exactly these issues, which might not be a bad idea for any plant-based company brave enough to ask such questions!

More critically, it leaves you with a very real and tangible problem when it comes to creating material / content / Thought Leadership appropriate for different Target Readerships.

Leadership for your Readership: Multiple & Conflicting Demographics

Can you see how the stance “any reduction in emissions and reduction in meat consumption is a good thing” creates potentially conflicting Readership groups? Let’s say half your customers are strict vegans and half merely want to eat less red meat. Do you take a more specific stance or do you somehow separate your Thought Leadership materials and pray that the strict vegan group never finds the broader material and vice versa?!

These of course are not only Readership issues but Customer Demographic issues. However it’s far easier to be vague when your stance is never explored in depth or written down. The fully vegan buyer in the supermarket has no awareness of whether other buyers are vegan or not.

My point, of course, is not at all that such a company should ditch veganism and start an organic chicken farm instead! Nor am I suggesting it’s impossible to have two different demographics that you are targeting (though I’d suggest that more than 5 groups can get very ‘messy’ from a thought Leadership / Content perspective).

It is rather to point out that until you get clear on what your company really thinks, it is very hard to write about it, advocate for it or commission material on it in depth. In short, you can’t convincingly lead thought until you’re clear on what that thought actually is.

In addition, if you do have multiple client / customer groups and if these in any way conflict, you have to think carefully about how to cater to them without one group being offended by material for the other. Whilst having separate Landing Pages and rigidly separate ‘Content Journeys’ (say) might seem a solution, be wary: if (in this example) you have one ‘journey’ for strict vegans and you write for them as if you yourselves are strict vegans, but also have another for ‘meat reducers’, and your strict vegan accidentally finds your other material, they’ll feel incredibly let down and cheated.

Editorial Strategy: Get Clear on your Position

When it comes to Thought Leadership, then, you have to start thinking like a publisher - but you must also be clear on what is the backbone of your position (here at SLETL we call this Core Concept). Of course this is not a new idea. Content Marketing has been advocating ‘thinking like a publisher’ for at least a decade; it’s absolutely correct and, again, Thought Leadership is really only superior quality, longer and more in-depth written content. Nonetheless for all the times it’s been said, there are still too many SMEs who don’t in fact think through their Thought Leadership (or Content) Strategy but rather post/publish willy-nilly with no clear idea of why.

In the example above, plant-based-types (let's say) who care primarily about animal rights may have somewhat different opinions to those who care primarily about emissions. In addition individual visitors to the website may only be looking for vegan recipes, which really requires more of a visually driven content strategy, whilst corporate readers (a supermarket interested in stocking the product, say) - and also more earnest consumers - may want to see more in-depth material, likely including material showcasing a stance on farming methods and supply chains, which would be better suited to an in-depth White Paper, perhaps even bespoke/proprietary research – all as evidence that the Brand takes such issues seriously.

It's clear that the more groups of potential clients/customers there are, the more complex the Thought Leadership strategy will be. If Thought Leadership strategy (or Content Strategy if you prefer the old term) is often likened to magazine publishing (publishing for the same readership but with features with different themes and formats), then the more inter-related but different client bases you have, the more your job here comes closer to leading a media agency or publishing company running multiple magazines, or with multiple different imprints.

The difficulty of course is that, for example, with a publishing house with multiple imprints, readers of one imprint likely won’t be aware of other imprints, and magazine readers (unless they happen to have a publishing background themselves and too much time on their hands!) are unlikely to actively go looking online to find out which other titles are within their staple. Of course, publishers are careful not be too conflicting: I doubt there is a magazine group that simultaneously publishes both Plant Based Weekly and Pig Farming Bimonthly.

Although, as we've said above, there are many ways you can separate out and create different ‘journeys’ for different groups of readers/customers/clients (including directing people to different landing pages when you post on a forum away from your site), publishing stringently from one stance that would be offensive as a position to one of your other groups is a plant-based recipe for potential brand disaster! And, let's be honest, it's also not terribly authentic: there’s an enormous difference between tailoring material and proffering viewpoints that you yourself are not truly wedded to purely because you think that’s what a particular group wants to hear.

This of course raises questions around how realistic it is for a Company to have a very broad stance and why, for ethical or cause-driven companies especially, it may be easier said than done to cater to multiple demographics. ‘We sell to everyone interested in plant based food’ is a tricky stance to pull off from an authentic Marketing perspective because whilst this lack of segmentation may work in the supermarkets - where one customer doesn't know the ethical position of another customer - it is far harder to pull off in actual marketing campaigns and even harder when positions are clearly written down, as in Thought Leadership Marketing. Whilst this is merely one hypothetical Case Study, it does show how lack of clarity around Company thinking and Brand Concepts (or even an active hope for ambiguity: the vague dream of 'targeting everybody') starts to unravel when it comes to Thought Leadership.

Yes: you can simply avoid ever writing down your position and so entirely avoid Thought Leadership. Not only is this a bad idea from a Marketing perspective but if you claim to care, loyal clients / customers are going to want to hear what you have to say.

The most critical step, then, before you even get going on Strategy (let alone producing Thought Leadership material) is to be crystal clear on the very thoughts that you, as a company, intend to lead.

If you're keen to get clear on your Company Core Concept you may want to take a look here, or if you're hesitant but still want to learn more about Thought Leadership marketing take a look here.

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If you're especially interested in Ethical Business then feel free to visit here, or to find out more about Susan Lawson Thought Leadership visit here.