Define Who’s Not Your Target
“We’re not competing with kale salad!”
— Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods
When launching innovative products, it’s incredibly important to know who your customer is NOT. This flies in the face of conventional business-building logic, and the scramble for users and likes and views and retweets. One would think that, when getting started with a new venture, it’s always better to have a bigger target market (“Who’s your product for?” “Everybody!”).
But that’s not the case.
The best entrepreneurs are just as deft at disqualifying customers as they are at attracting new ones. Brown is outspoken about the fact that many vegetarians refuse to try the Impossible Burger because it disgusts them — it just seems too real — and that delights him! “My own sister can’t bring herself to try it, even though she believes me, that there’s really no animal product in the meat.”
When Brown set out to address the climate crisis, he knew he wasn’t going to win by catering to the already-convinced. He had to create a product that hard-core meat-lovers preferred to the meat of a cow. As he described in his fantastic conversation with Guy Raz on How I Built This, “Critics say, ‘But look how much sodium is in it!’ People, we’re not competing with kale salad!”
Most products in the “animal-cruelty free” or “environmentally conscious” space end up comparing themselves to kale salad. Brown and co had the wherewithal to recognize that that’s not the basis of comparison that matters, if they want to really move the needle. An important implication of this insight is that anyone who was making a purchase decision based upon comparison to kale salad’s nutritional content simply wasn’t a customer.
There’s a reason an environmentally-friendly product hadn’t truly broken through prior to Impossible’s arrival on the scene. You’ve got to be willing to question conventional wisdom to truly shatter the paradigm.
Related: Reframe The Competitive Set
Related: Beware Conventional Wisdom
Related: Challenge the Paradigm
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The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.