They Assume It's One Or The Other

Tony’s Chocolonely is a company with a clear mission

They want to end exploitation in the cocoa industry.

They’ve campaigned against child labour, forced labour, and the underpayment of farmers.

That’s the entire reason the company exists - three Dutch journalists made a documentary about it, nothing changed, so they went and made chocolate instead.

Their marketing carried this message for years - until they looked at the data.

Repeats were strong - if you tried the chocolate, you loved it and came back.

But consideration to trial was the problem - getting someone to pick it up off the shelf in the first place.

Because that isn’t the moment they thought it was.

Someone getting off the tube after a rubbish day at work is standing in front of the chocolate thinking which one of these is going to make me feel better.

They are not standing there thinking which one of these is going to make the world a better place.

The mission in that moment was actually stopping people from buying

Because there’s an assumption from customers that if it’s got this nice mission - they must cut corners - it’s not as nice.

Rory Sutherland makes this point about environmental claims with products - sustainability makes a great backing singer, but it’s a terrible lead.

The issue is that people don’t add benefits together, they read them as a trade-off, and they price what you must give up.

Tell someone a cleaning product is eco-friendly and they hear it doesn’t clean as well. Give people government subsidies for electric cars, they assume they’re crap.

I often wonder whether ‘relationship with food’ work has the same effect.

I’m not talking about whether the work is necessary, or the details of whether people can lose weight whilst simultaneously improving their relationship with food.

Purely from a marketing perspective - if you help people with their relationship with food, but also help with weight loss - then you need to talk about it.

Silence on the weight loss side of things is them assuming that you don’t help with it, and therefore you’re not for them.

Just like with Tony’s, you don’t drop that mission - you just meet people where they’re at, have more customers, which is the only way the mission can happen.

So if you help people lose weight, say you help people lose weight.

Not because you’ve ‘sold out.’

The person who most needs everything else you do is scrolling past you right now, assuming you won’t help them with the thing they actually came for.