Are Your Customers Buying the Status Quo?

Green brands can’t just rely on believers in sustainability to drive their businesses forward.

Tami Jarvis loves animals and hates plastic. 

Horrified by gruesome videos of animal cruelty and the deteriorating state of the planet, she knew she needed to change her lifestyle. She cut out meat and avoided plastic, but it wasn’t enough.

As an advocate with an entrepreneurial spirit, she realized, “I absolutely had to do whatever I could to fight as many issues as possible.” 

She founded Harmless Store, a vegan, minimal packaging grocery store in North London, England. Environmentally conscious people flocked to the store from its opening in 2018, and she moved to a bigger location within two years.  

Jarvis had dreams of expanding the store to two or three locations. 

But while those customers sustained the store for a few years, Jarvis was continuously fighting against closure. 

Over and over she heard customers complain about their perception of the store’s prices. In an Instagram post, she proved that a cart of 28 household essentials at Harmless Store was actually £19.70 less expensive than at the popular chain Sainsbury’s.

In this post, she shared her frustrations and last attempt to keep the physical store open: 

“The reason Harmless Store nearly closed down this week was because I have spent too many years worrying about comments that we’re too expensive… we’re not… I’ve been keeping the prices as low as can be to keep people coming in. It hasn’t worked.”

Even with almost 800 likes, the post wasn’t going to bring the customers that Harmless Store needed. As one dedicated customer commented: “I keep telling people but people resort to their old ways – even if this would save them money! I’ll keep sharing and keeping shouting from the roof tops about you guys!” 

By 2024, six years after founding Harmless Store, Jarvis had closed the store she once dreamed of expanding. 

Instead of fighting against people’s misconceptions about pricing, Jarvis needed to show buyers how shopping at Harmless Store could help them solve critical daily problems and make a positive global impact.

To spur action, sustainable companies must connect the global stakes of climate change with the daily problems their individual buyers face.

Understanding and relating to a problem is the first step of any buying decision. It’s also the foundation of a brand’s strategic narrative. Every story begins with an existential threat that endangers life as your customers know it—this manifests in both large, global ways and day-to-day pain points. 

A brand’s strategic narrative creates urgency around these pain points and empowers your buyer to take on the challenge of resolving them—and to make a purchasing decision.

To pull people through their sales funnel, every company must highlight three levels of pain points for their buyers: existential, community, and individual. 

Existential pain points are the overarching problems that affect the world and everyone in it. These pain points clearly show what’s at stake and anchor the arc of a brand’s story. For companies founded on sustainability, their prospects and customers are worried about the fact that the world is being destroyed.

More specific than existential pain points, community pain points negatively impact the entire community, such as how landfills are filling up and we’re running out of places to put our plastic waste. For B2B companies, this type of pain point can be thought of as organizational, affecting the organization as a whole.

Individual pain points are those that directly impact the buyer’s day-to-day life, such as trash littering their streets. When it comes to sustainability, companies have to consider why someone would change their habits or routine in favor of their product or service. 

Take The Rounds, for example. 

Alexander Torrey and Byungwoo Ko founded the brand in 2019 as a zero-waste delivery service that refills staple items without wasteful packaging. 

Torrey originally had the idea when he got soap delivered from Amazon:

“It got me wondering why I had this huge box and a bunch of packaging in my apartment, all for a small bottle of hand soap that I’d eventually throw away just like the previous one. Then I started thinking about all the other units in my apartment building and the units in surrounding buildings, and realized just how much unnecessary material is getting delivered and also going to waste.” 

Torrey realized that something as simple as ordering a new hand soap was contributing to the destruction of the planet. He built The Rounds on ensuring people see the urgency in fighting against the status quo to reduce packaging waste. 

In just three years, The Rounds raised $42 million in funding and had expanded to multiple cities.

The Rounds succeeds because it clearly defines its buyers’ pain points on multiple levels. It shows people why they can’t stick with the status quo and that they understand both daily struggles and how those struggles affect global, environmental stakes.

To demonstrate the existential threat, The Rounds shares the harmful impact of plastic on the planet: “Plastic lasts forever, but most is only used once. By 2050, scientists predict the ocean will contain more plastic than fish.”

This prediction paints a bleak picture of the future. Plastic is destroying the world, and without meaningful changes, there will be no world to live in. 

While the existential threat a sustainability-focused company addresses is clear, it alone doesn’t spur action in buyers. Most people know that the ocean is slowly filling up with plastic, but that knowledge feels very separate from their daily lives. 

Without individual and community threats to connect buyers to the existential threat, they can continue to ignore the problem.

The Rounds knows the problems and fears that plague community members, and they aren’t shy about voicing those thoughts:

“You want to shop locally, but the effort feels overwhelming.”

“You feel guilty about the pile of Amazon boxes and single-use plastic.”

These statements effectively connect individual pain points to the existential threat: the reason people feel guilty about piles of boxes and shopping at big chains is because they know these actions are actively contributing to the world’s destruction. This initial spark of recognition and empathy draws people into the brand’s story to learn more about the challenges facing their community and the world.

The Rounds points out that it’s not just an individual’s actions contributing to global destruction, but a collective community problem: “Amazon ships more than 3.3 million boxes per day, 1.2 billion/year. That’s a lot of boxes.” 

This statistic doesn’t even account for the plastic bags and bottles inside those boxes. The Rounds demonstrates how each person’s buying decisions build upon each other to create an unmanageable waste problem. 

By explicitly laying out three levels of challenges, The Rounds builds a connection with buyers, including—perhaps most importantly—those who might not already be predisposed to shop sustainably. 

That’s because for a brand to grow, it must win over not only the customers who see the world as they do but those who need to be persuaded through their own individual challenges to bring about a bigger change. There are three types of consumers: true believers, agnostics, and disbelievers.

“True believers” are fully bought into a brand’s purpose and vision already. These are the people who purchase sustainable products over traditional products, regardless of the price and quality. “Agnostics” see value in a brand’s products but will only purchase them if they have similar quality and price as the alternatives. “Disbelievers” are indifferent or skeptical of a brand’s purpose and vision. When they see sustainable products, they are less likely to buy them because they assume that the quality is not as good.  

The pitfall of many sustainability brands, like the Harmless Store, is that they believe sustainability speaks for itself. However, only a small portion of their audience is fully bought into sustainability. 

The Rounds succeeds by capturing the “agnostics” in their strategic brand story. 

Positioning The Rounds as “The easiest way to shop sustainably,” Torrey and Ko prioritized their buyers’ primary individual concern — accessibility. They knew that for buyers to use their services, people needed to see The Rounds not only as a way to save the planet but also as a solution to the challenges of traditional grocery shopping and online deliveries.

By leading with accessibility, The Rounds appeals to a wider audience. They aren’t just speaking to people who want to shop sustainably, but rather everyone in the community who’s frustrated with their own shopping experience.

To drive the change they hope to inspire, each brand needs a strategic narrative that defines and addresses multiple levels of challenges for their customers. A powerful brand story has compelling challenges that your prospects can’t ignore, driving urgency and inspiring action. 

Without a strategic brand story, a company is just another player in the market. Companies that want to make a real impact have to do more than just offer a product—they need to tell a compelling story that connects buyers’ daily struggles with the larger existential threat. 

With dedicated customers aligned behind your vision and ready to tackle individual, community, and existential challenges, brands can help customers change the world. 

Alicia Sigmon is a Brand Storyteller at Woden. Read our extensive guide on how to craft your organization’s narrative, or send us an email at connect@wodenworks.com to uncover what makes you essential.