Harnessing Storytelling for Success: Taking Organic from Virtue to Value

Last Thursday saw Soil Association Certification’s annual Organic Trade Conference, this year themed ‘ Winning Hearts and Minds’, an exploration on how to use storytelling and data to bolster the market and inspire future generations.

In a powerful and dynamic keynote, we heard from sustainability expert Solitaire Townsend, co-founder and chief solutionist at Futerra. Solitaire’s relationship with organic is long and personal. Growing up on a council estate in East Anglia, where she and her siblings were once covered in pesticides from a crop duster whilst visiting a local field - a visceral and horrifying moment that forged a deep connection with organic.

Solitaire’s own experience has been formative in her work in sustainability marketing, cementing a belief that as brands and marketers we must connect with people and address their needs as individuals. Solitaire’s message was clear and disruptive - if we want to grow the organic market, we must stop preaching and start connecting.

She issued a bold challenge to organic brands: “change your story and make the consumer the hero”.

 

The values-action barrier

We often hear talk of the “values-action gap”, the idea that people say they care but don’t act accordingly. Solitaire reframed this: it’s not a gap, it’s a barrier. “Calling it a gap implies a morality gap - it implies they’re lying. They’re not. They want to live their values, but they’re blocked, by price, availability, trust, and even self-perception”.

Solitaire says so much of our behaviour is influenced by self-perception. Consumers are questioning whether organic is “for people like me? Am I that kind of person?”.

“As a community, we need to do a much better job of understanding these barriers”, says Solitaire.

 

The problem with purpose-led marketing: Preaching to the not-converted

Organic brands and businesses have long leaned on purpose-based messaging -centring what they stand for, the causes they support, and the values they uphold. But as Solitaire pointed out, this kind of “ego marketing” excludes the consumer, and “people can smell the odour of self-righteousness”.

Communicating a deep sense of purpose to customers isn’t going to solve the barriers they face. “Your purpose, and what you stand for, as businesses, as brands, as NGO’s –it’s all about you”.

Marketing is never about you or your business. “Really great storytelling is about the communities you’re trying to engage”, says Solitaire. Her organisation Futerra ran an analysis of the top 100 marketing campaigns from the sustainability sector last year and found that 45% of them didn’t mention a benefit to the consumer, instead presenting the organisation itself as the hero about to save the day. “The campaigns were beautiful – they made you want to cry. But they didn’t make you want to buy.” 

 

Bursting our own bubble: Adopting benefits marketing

Solitaire warns against repeating the same green claims and attempting to recruit “every single person with the same values in terms of biodiversity, animal welfare, the future of farming. We need to get out of our bubble”, she says. To grow the market beyond 2%, we must reach beyond the ‘deep-green’ segment already on-side, and that means selling benefits, not our own values.

“The only thing that can smash through those barriers, are benefits”, says Solitaire, but too many organic businesses are positioning ‘organic’ as the key benefit. Consumers don’t automatically understand the wider benefits of organic to nature, biodiversity, health, animal welfare etc; we just assume they do. We also assume they care.

 

The benefits trifecta

We need to go back to basics and ‘marketing 101’ – what are the functional benefits of the product we are selling? "If the public knew what was in it for them, they would buy more organic”, says Solitaire.

Moreover, we must lean into emotional and social benefits to help consumers to “navigate a saturated world of options” and give a more rounded view beyond functional benefits which can appear marginal from product to product. “It’s not just the money-saving or the health benefits, it’s the feel-good”.

Adapting benefits to social segments

For Solitaire, organic brands should look to three stark consumer segments to form their marketing campaigns, and steer them accordingly towards relevant functional, emotional and social benefits. Solitaire adopts the following psychographic segments to explain the market:

• Greens: Make up a maximum of 30% of the consumer base. Already loyal and sensitive to sustainability concerns, but are big world thinkers on an international scale, and less likely to act in their local communities.

• Golds: Make up about half of the customer base. Aspirational, open to influence, their reality is centred and focused on ‘me’, and living in the present. Status and virtue signalling are of high importance, focus more on how they look and present to other, over solutions for the world or local community.

• Bricks: Make up a maximum of 30%. Resistant but reachable, but their reality is focused on home, local community, workplace. This group seeks out safety and practicality, romanticising the past. Sustainability and climate change are not front of concerns, but practical and economic solutions would be of interest.

Solitaire issued a loud call to tailor messaging and storytelling to Bricks and Golds to speak to the barriers they may have up - making organic sexy and aspirational for Golds, practical and relatable for Bricks.

 

Ultimately, your customer is the hero of the story

Brands exist to “coach, enable, and provide the consumer to be the person who is making the big difference. There’s a lot of self-heroing in the movement, rather than consumer-heroing.”

Solitaire goes on to suggest that the consumer should be recognised too as the hero of a brand’s story and impact they may have had. “Everything your organisation has achieved doesn’t belong to you - it belongs to your consumer for having funded it.” Positioning impact in such a powerful and symbiotic way goes a long way to building consumer relationships and brand loyalty, as well as helping the consumer to feel they play an active part in the organic community.

Solitaire took the example of reusable water bottles. On the surface, the benefits are functional; they last forever, they keep water cool, they’re transportable. But they’re also status symbols. They signal intelligence, care, and coolness. They centre the buyer as the hero, they say “what a great person you are for making that decision.”

She also points to Who Gives A Crap?, the toilet paper subscription service. As a brand, they have invested in building toilets in communities around the world, but their messaging is a lot closer to home with the strapline, “Your bum is a hero – You should probably get it a cape”.

 

Such marketing campaigns pull on the emotional and social strings to show the consumer what’s in it for them. Heightened self-worth, more joy, more comfort, more importance. Organic can do the same, if we let it.

 

“Virtue signalling” isn’t a dirty word

Organic should make people feel good about themselves. It should “give them a little high” - a moment of pride, a sense of virtue, a boost in status. A major social benefit for shoppers is the ability to ‘virtue signal’ - how can brands help a consumer to wear their virtues on their sleeve and tell the world what they believe in? How do we make sure they feel they have communicated their own virtues, rather than those of a brand?

 

Price - the last barrier to organic?

Among the many barriers we see for mainstream consumers, price perceptions of organic are consistently cited. Many consumers see organic as carrying a “morality tax” - a premium for doing the right thing, or that things that are good for you must cost more. We know within our sector that the price question is more myth than reality – often the price difference is not as much as is perceived. Can we reframe the price question to include notions of benefits to the consumer, such as organic offering long-term value and health savings, addressing wider social and systemic pressures, securing a future for food and the environment? Storytelling is key to showing organic as a smart investment, not a sacrifice, and challenging such a deep-rooted perception which continues to work against organic.

 

Regen? Yes, but organic is the big kid

Within the sustainability bubble, “regenerative might currently be a huge deal, but the mainstream consumer isn’t even aware of it”, says Solitaire. During the conference we heard from Niamh Noone, Head of Marketing & Communications, Soil Association Certification and Sarah Compson, Director of Standards Innovation, The Soil Association, as they discussed the unique opportunity organic businesses have to lead the regen conversation and demonstrate how organic already delivers on regenerative principles.

Solitaire urges organic businesses and retailers to “not switch horses… within our bubble and not drop [the term ‘organic’] which has public recognition” and risk adding to the noise. For Solitaire, organic remains “the big kid” in the consumer consciousness for the time-being.

 

Key actions for organic brands

Organic brands have an incredible community and a powerful product. But to grow beyond our 2% of the current market, we must:

• Stop self-heroing and start consumer-heroing

• Sell benefits, not just repeat our values

• Make organic aspirational, emotionally and socially

• Break down barriers to action

• Segment smartly and speak to each group’s desires

• Celebrate consumers for choosing organic.

 

If you’d like to look over Solitaire’s slides from her keynote, you can download them here. We've also developed a roundup of key takeaways from the day.