Why Impossible Foods Spoke to Meat Eaters in Their Own Language

The man selling plant-based meat walks through a barbecue, past a hot-dog-eating contest, and rides off on a motorbike. Everyone around him is enjoying meat. He looks completely at home.

That is The Walk, the 30-second film at the centre of Impossible Foods’ May 2024 campaign, made with the agency Erich & Kallman. The company put a meat lover in charge of the invitation. ^{1 2}

The line was deliberately mischievous. “We’re solving the meat problem with more meat.” What changed was where the meat came from. The pleasure, the confidence and the familiar occasions could all stay. ¹

For a company selling an alternative, that is an interesting place to start. The campaign gave its intended audience a role they could recognise themselves in, and how it did that is worth more attention than calling the advert bold.

Understand what the audience thinks the category asks of them

An unfamiliar product arrives with more than a specification. People form a view of who it is for and what choosing it would say about them.

For some buyers, a plant-based option suggests a change in food, habit or identity they have no interest in making. Listing environmental benefits will not necessarily settle that. The audience may still feel the category belongs to someone else.

Our reading is that the campaign tackled that possible barrier before asking anyone to weigh the wider mission. Familiar food in familiar settings gave the product a place in an existing way of life.

That is our interpretation of the creative strategy. It says nothing certain about how every meat eater thinks, and it is no evidence that the campaign changed behaviour.

For a company working on its own positioning, the useful question is what the audience believes it must give up to consider the offer. The answer could be convenience, competence, enjoyment, reliability or belonging. Find out through real conversations, and resist assuming the objection is a lack of information.

Show the product in the occasion where it is used

The campaign’s settings gave the product a context people already knew. A viewer could see where it belonged before thinking about how it was made.

That order matters when the production method is unfamiliar. Founders often want to begin with the technology, because it holds the work they have spent years on. The audience is usually trying to answer a simpler question first, such as whether this belongs in a meal they want to eat.

The same principle applies to business buyers, with different evidence and a different decision. A manufacturer evaluating a new material needs to recognise the application, the process it enters and the specification it has to meet. The mechanism becomes useful once those questions have somewhere to sit. Paul Shapiro of Better Meat Co. described his company’s position in his interview with us. “We’re a business-to-business, or B2B, ingredients company, so we don't aim to create a consumer-facing brand for grocery store shelves. Instead, our product is for the companies that create those brands.” His audience is the food company deciding whether the ingredient works in its own products. Our piece on technology versus product stories goes further on this.

A simple test is to show your opening page or first slide to a relevant reader and ask what they think the product is for, where they would use it and what they would need to know next. Their answers reveal far more than asking whether they like the wording.

Give the humour a strategic job

The joke starts from an apparent contradiction, solving a problem associated with meat by offering more meat. It only works if the viewer understands that “meat” can mean the eating experience while the source changes.

The spokesman’s exaggerated confidence carries that idea. In our reading, he gives plant-based food a loud, unapologetic place in a setting where it might otherwise be the alternative someone reluctantly brings to the barbecue.

That is why humour deserves more thought than a joke added to an earnest message. Here the comic premise carries the positioning. Take away the product idea and the joke loses most of its point.

Familiarity has limits. It turns into caricature when a company mistakes an obvious cultural cue for a full understanding of its customers. Any audience varies in taste, budget, habits and reasons for buying. A campaign can choose one group and still respect those differences, as long as its creative decisions follow evidence about the people it wants to reach.

For climate companies, this is a reason to listen carefully before deciding an audience does not care about sustainability. A buyer can value the environmental outcome and still be unable to approve the product because of price, performance, supply or the effort of adopting it. Those constraints need a clear answer, and a funnier message will not remove them. Our piece on why sustainability messaging does not sell looks at that gap in more detail.

Let the creative idea support a claim the product can carry

A memorable campaign can earn attention. The product still has to perform when people choose it and use it.

In food that means taste, price, availability, preparation and wanting to eat it again. Anthony Chow of Agronomics put the consumer side plainly in his interview with us. “The plant-based companies have (re-)learned that price, taste and convenience are the three key reasons that the vast majority of people make food purchasing decisions.” Our reading is that a campaign can earn the first look, and those three decide whether people buy again. In an industrial sale it means specification, integration, continuity of supply and the cost of a failure.

Environmental and health claims need their own evidence, including the comparison and conditions that make them meaningful. A company’s campaign page is a source for what the company says. It is not independent confirmation of every benefit it advertises.

This is where positioning gets demanding. The team needs to know which promise brings the audience into the conversation and which evidence will hold it there after the first impression.

The same applies to creative ambition. If a campaign suggests ease, the experience should be easy. If it suggests nothing important has to change, the company should be ready to explain what adoption actually requires.

Analyse the strategy without inventing the result

The campaign gives plenty to discuss on audience, framing, tone and positioning. Its launch material documents the intended approach. On its own, that material does not show that the advertising increased trial, repeat purchase or sales.

Keeping that line clear makes the analysis stronger. We can explain why a creative decision might address a particular barrier, then name the evidence that would test the reading.

For a consumer campaign like this, the useful questions are whether the intended audience saw the product as relevant, tried it, enjoyed it and bought it again. Any results would still need context on distribution, price, promotions and whatever else changed at the same time.

A company judging its own work should pick the measure that matches the job. A campaign meant to build recognition has a different immediate task from a product page meant to help someone choose. Attention and commercial adoption belong in the same account, with the link between them examined, never assumed.

Find the equivalent question in your own market

Copying the humour or the visual style would miss the point. Start with the audience and the change the offer asks them to make.

Work out what they already value, which parts of their current practice they want to keep and what they believe the new option threatens. Then separate the concerns that come from experience from those that come from an incomplete picture of the product.

Next, decide what the opening communication has to establish. It might be that the product fits an existing process, serves a familiar occasion or meets a performance requirement the reader assumed it could not.

Show the evidence for that point, and let the wider environmental case add to an offer the audience already understands.

The lesson from Impossible’s campaign is the care it took over the audience’s starting position. The product entered through a world the intended viewer recognised. Every company has to find that point of recognition for itself, then make sure the offer deserves the attention it gets.

If your audience struggles to see where your product fits, Brighter Future’s positioning work connects the audience’s situation, the product and the evidence behind the offer. Brighter Future’s positioning work connects the audience’s situation, the product and the evidence behind the offer.

Sources and further reading

1. Impossible Foods, First major marketing campaign featuring new brand identity, May 2024
2. Marketing Dive, Impossible Foods’ Americana ads address the meat problem, 6 May 2024
3. Impossible Foods, campaign page
4. Brighter Future, Why Sustainability Messaging Does Not Sell
5. Brighter Future, Technology vs Product

First published 29 May 2024, revised and restored at its original address. This is analysis of a public campaign. It makes no claim about the campaign’s commercial results.