What Slutty Vegan Teaches Us About Effective Moral Marketing
Key points regarding Slutty Vegan’s approach to moral marketing:
While Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat has focused their marketing efforts on the morality of their product, entrepreneur Pinky Cole took another route completely, founding her restaurant chain, Slutty Vegan
Slutty Vegan turned the concept of veganism on its head. Typically associated with moral constraint, her vegan brand was about, pleasure, taboo, and fun
The success of Slutty Vegan helps illustrates the power of effective moral marketing: to encourage consumers to adopt a moral product, the brand need not make morality a component of their marketing.
The summer of 2016 was the ultimate low point for Pinky Cole. An Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Cole’s long-time dream was to own and operate her own vegetarian restaurant. But the restaurant, along with her aspirations, went up in flames in a tragic grease fire. Most of her life savings also went up in those same flames, as she had invested everything she had into the business, and had no fire insurance.
Her car was repossessed, and she faced eviction from her apartment. To make matters worse, her boyfriend was arrested, and later convicted of manslaughter, for fatally injuring someone in a brawl. Cole found herself alone, broke, and nearly homeless.
This was a tragic nadir. Now in retrospect, however, it was merely a chapter in the ultimate underdog story for one of vegan meat's greatest pioneers. Just a few short years later, Pinky Cole would come back to the restaurant scene with a vengeance. Her brand: Slutty Vegan.
The concept began as a food truck in Atlanta in 2019, where she sold burgers, fries, chicken wings, and more - all vegan, and all under a “fun, slutty” theme. It was an instant hit. As Cole remembers, "The next thing I know, there's about 300 people standing outside, trying to pick up their orders” The flagship store opened in 2020, and the rest, as they say, is history. The demand for Slutty Vegan has been astronomical. Cole has since expanded to over twenty locations. It’s not unusual for patrons to wait hours at the door, or to travel hundreds of miles on a Slutty Vegan pilgrimage.
Slutty Vegan has also attracted the admiration, and the financial backing, of some of the restaurant world’s biggest names. Danny Meyer, the founder of the publicly traded Shake Shack Burger Chain instantly fell in love with the brand’s concept. “I’ve never seen food presented in such a fun way before”, he told Forbes. “I’ve got the Michael Jordan of food on my team”. In 2022, he bought a 25% ownership stake in Slutty Vegan, valuing the company at over $100M. Not bad for a place that, only a few years earlier, was selling food out of a single food truck.
Slutty Vegan has succeeded in vegan meat where Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have failed. And it's not hard to pinpoint why: the approach to morality in the brand.
How Slutty Vegan Approached Moral Marketing
Slutty Vegan is a captivating brand that turns all of the ideas about veganism on its head. When you think about veganism, you think about something highly moralistic, and something about personal restraint. It's traditionally a highly moralistic concept: you’re willing to forego the pleasures of eating meat and animal products because it's the right thing, morally, to do.
Sluttiness - sexual promiscuity, is the opposite, on both of these dimensions. It's about doing something you think is wrong, but giving in to your hedonistic urges anyway. As Danny Meyer told The New Yorker, “Slutty Vegan is this very unusual juxtaposition of veganism, which is often connected to what I’m not allowed to eat, with sluttiness, which is all the things that I’m gonna do even though I’m not allowed to.”
The Slutty Vegan brand is consistently, and emphatically expressed in the entirety of its marketing, and throughout the customer experience. The burgers have names like Ménage à Trois (vegan bacon & vegan shrimp), Fussy Hussy (caramelized onions & vegan cheese), and the Super Slut (jalapeños & guacamole). If it’s a customer’s first time, and they admit it, staff will jokingly refer to them as a “virgin slut” as they take their order. The stores are decked out in “slutty” regalia, donning neon signs with slogans like, “Eat Plants You Slut”.
As Cole described to Forbes, "When you walk into the doors of Slutty Vegan..it's like coming into a sanctuary of fun. We’ve got Hip Hop music. We're yelling at you. We're dancing. You’ve got people calling you a slut. You get your food. It’s a party atmosphere."
Like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, Slutty Vegan understands that success means appealing to the non-vegan crowd. But unlike her vegan meat competitors, Slutty Vegan has cultivated a brand that does that. Roughly 75% of Slutty Vegan’s customers are meat-eaters. And this is exactly what Pinky Cole wants. “We like it that way..It’s not a vegan concept where we’re this glorified group that’s better than everybody else.” Their brand has been amplified by many celebrities, including local legends Usher and Shaquille O’Neill. Neither of them are vegan.
Slutty Vegan isn’t preachy. Unlike Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, there are no moral claims embedded into the brand - the central argument isn’t an ethical one (e.g. eat this, and you’ll be a good person), but a fun, enticing one (e.g. eat this, and have fun with us). Beyond Meat, in particular, has tripled down on its claim that this is good for human health. Slutty Vegan though, will even be square with you about the healthiness of their menu. As Pinky Cole has stated, “I won’t sit here and tell you to eat Slutty Vegan every single day, all day. But I do want you to understand that veganism can be healthier, even if it starts with burgers and fries.”
While Cole is a long-time vegan herself, she isn’t a moral purist, and she doesn’t demand veganism amongst her staff, or her inner circle. In June 2023 she married Derrick Hayes, the founder of Atlanta’s storied “Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks”. Hayes, originally from Philadelphia, is credited with bringing “authentic”, fully meat-based cheesesteaks to the Atlanta region.
Slutty Vegan as a Food & Beverage Lifestyle Brand
As we’ve seen, branding has a particularly strong impact on food and beverage brands. The sense of taste - more so than any of our five senses, is highly impressionable. What we come to think about what we’re consuming, has a massive impact on the raw, gustatory experience itself. Unless they’re told which is which, when they’re presented the same way on a fancy plate, people can’t tell the difference between duck pate and pureed dog food. In a blind taste test, people prefer Pepsi; Coca-Cola tastes great only when you know you’re drinking a Coke.
Put simply, when it comes to food, the brand is paramount. Pinky Cole gets that maybe more than anyone in the vegan meats business. “Food needs personality,” she told The New Yorker. As her business has grown, she’s maintained a high level of quality, and has tripled down on the brand. “Slutty Vegan is not just a restaurant.. people look at us as a lifestyle brand.”
And she’s right. One of the truest measures of a brand’s success is the degree to which other brands want to collaborate with you. Your brand is so strong, so distinct, and so appealing that it can be an asset to other brands, in other industries. By this measure, Slutty Vegan is also knocking it out of the park. Slutty Vegan did a limited drop with Steve Madden on a special edition vegan-leather shoe, which sold out in less than two days.
Slutty Vegan has also collaborated with Shake Shack on limited-edition vegan burgers, which sold out in mere hours. They’ve also been in discussions with Lululemon about special yoga wear and about collaborative campaigns centering around body positivity. Hard to imagine any of these collaborations with the brands of Beyond Meat or Impossible Burger.
Slutty Vegan, Animal Welfare, and Moral Arguments
The philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, in 1975, which has sold over half a million copies and has been translated into 16 languages. Since that time, the percentage of Americans who call themselves vegans or vegetarians has flatlined. As The Atlantic journalist Derek Thompson has observed, “For the past 50 years, Americans have basically responded to the case against eating animals by eating more animals.”
Making a moral argument is an uphill battle. As Leah Garcés, the Atlanta-based president of Mercy for Animals says, “As an advocate, I wanna just tell people, It’s cruel, don’t eat animals. But, even if you feel that, it’s a message that causes walls to go up.” Garces, however, has found inspiration in Pinky Cole, who she calls a “genius”.
As we’ve seen with Impossible Foods and Beyond Burger, this becomes even more difficult in the domain of branding and marketing. Morality has a branding problem. Armed with TED talks, the imagery of tortured animals in factory farms, and statistics about climate change, these companies have poured billions into changing people’s behavior around meat consumption. And with very little to show for it.
By contrast, few organizations have made as significant an impact as Slutty Vegan in adopting vegan foods. And it’s done so by challenging the traditional argument that a vegan diet should be an act of moralistic constraint. And herein lies Cole's true genius: to inspire moral behavior without making a single, moral claim.
This is part 2 of a multi-part series on the interchange between morality and branding. To be the first to access the next piece, sign-up to the free newsletter
Photo by Hector Gomez via UnSplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for The Effective Moral Marketing of Slutty Vegan
Bethea, C. (April, 2023), Special Sauce, The New Yorker
Harris, R. (May, 2022), Slutty Vegan Founder Pinky Cole Raises $25 Million In Series A Funding Round With New Voices Fund And Enlightened Hospitality Investments As Lead Investors, Forbes
Thompson, D. (Feb, 2023), The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Fake Meat in America, Plain English with Derek Thompson, Podcast
