Radical Inclusion. Ori Brafman
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the debate.
Over the next months, they put the protests on hold and strategized about how to actually make a difference—how to get through to the people they were trying to reach. The group came up with a number of ideas for new tactics, but Ori realized that no matter what they did, BSAL couldn’t compete with groups like the lacrosse club. It just wasn’t as . . . fun.
Then one evening Ori and his friend Leor Jacobi allowed themselves to dream.
“Imagine if we opened up a veggie burger place across from McDonald’s,” Ori said.
“With an even better playground outside,” Leor added.
“Yeah,” Ori continued. “We’d call it McVegan.”
There was a pause. A smile spreading across his face, Leor said, “We can do that.”
“Open a restaurant?” Ori asked.
“No, create the parody.” Leor spoke with alacrity. “Give veggie burgers away on Sproul.”
Leor sat down at his Mac that night and stayed glued to Photoshop for the next couple of days. The design he came up with featured the famous golden arches, but instead of the familiar slogan, it read “McVegan: Billions and Billions Saved.”
It’s important to note that just a few years earlier, unless he worked at an ad agency, Leor wouldn’t have had access to a computer able to perform this design work. But now, working in his little room at home, what he produced was . . . perfect.
McVegan represented a new tactic: create a positive narrative around being vegan. Being vegan is fun! It’s hip! All your friends are doing it! The next day Ori, Leor, and their friend Mark Schlosberg started vegan.org.
It was also the day that Ori killed BSAL. Immediately the president of every major animal rights group called him to yell at him: “You’re killing the animal rights movement!”
“Yes, that’s the idea,” he responded.
It wasn’t that he had anything against animal rights; it was just that he’d realized that the debate couldn’t be won because of the barriers it erected.
For one thing, scientists who used animals in their labs could not, by definition, be a part of the movement. That left an entire group—a group of very smart people, many of whom conducted their research in hopes of helping other people by curing a disease or gaining knowledge about health—inherently excluded. What’s more, in a debate about morality and the role of animals, could you say for sure that you were right and that the other side was wrong?
Let’s pause for a moment. Ask yourself, how many times during your personal or professional life have you been on the right side of an argument but been unable to convince others around you?
How many teams have you been a part of that felt excluded from the overall organization?
And even if you’ve never held a protest sign in your life, how many times have you felt that you were speaking to deaf ears?
Now imagine what a pain it was to teach people about veganism, of all things.
Remember that at the time, in the mid-1990s, very few people even knew the word “vegan.” This was long before the numerous studies showing the benefits of a plant-based diet. Most people knew that vegetarianism meant not eating animals, but vegans avoid all animal-derived products—no eggs, dairy, or leather.
To add to the challenges, “vegan” is not exactly a melodious word that rolls off your tongue. It’s a branding choice no marketing person would ever come up with. Ori realized that either he could earnestly make the case for giving up animal products or he could take a page from McDonald’s book.
The objective of McVegan was to make veganism inclusive—even of nonvegans. Rather than engage in a debate, it created a narrative where veganism was palatable, fun, even funny. If the fast food chain was using clowns and playgrounds to promote its food, why couldn’t Ori do the same?
Wearing T-shirts bearing the golden arches and accompanied by the McVegan mascot, Reggie McVeggie, Ori’s group gave out free veggie burgers. And after months and months of tabling for animal rights only to be ignored, suddenly the McVegan stand was mobbed by curious students.
Within an hour, they had given out more than a thousand veggie burgers. Moreover, even nonvegans, ye olde carnivores, loved the T-shirts so much that they asked to buy them. All of a sudden people loved the activists; veganism was becoming a cool, fun counterculture movement. And no one was spitting in anyone’s face.
Leor and Ori printed colorful T-shirts and stickers and started selling them to punk-rock kids at concerts. The kids would stick them on their shoes, their bikes, their hats. The logo was becoming a fun fashion accessory.
One day Ori spotted a kid on a bike with a McVegan sticker.
“Did you get that at Gilman?” he asked the kid.
“At where?” the kid answered, unaware of the alternative venue where punk rock bands like Green Day performed before they made it big. “No, dude, I got it from my friend. He gave it to me because I work at McDonald’s.”
McVegan was equally appealing to punk rockers, to people who didn’t like the idea of corporate fast food, to kids who wanted to rebel, and to those who just thought it was funny. You could wear a McVegan T-shirt and still eat a Big Mac.
Soon other colleges held their own McVegan events, inspired by the narrative.
But not everyone thought it was funny.
Many of Ori’s friends in the environmental movement argued that McVegan still encouraged consumerism. They argued that McVegan belittled a serious issue. The fact that someone could wear a T-shirt and still consume meat was evidence, they argued, that the path to societal change was to defend the facts and work toward policy changes.
The other folks who weren’t amused, unsurprisingly, were McDonald’s executives and lawyers. Just as McVegan was gaining a little bit of attention, McDonald’s threatened to sue for trademark infringement.
Uh-oh.
How can you possibly win a legal battle against McDonald’s? Leor, Ori, and Mark huddled and ultimately made the decision based on their bicycles. Specifically, the bikes were pretty much their only possessions, so what did they have to lose?
They decided to fight back, but not in the way you’d expect. They realized that, unlike their previous protests, this wouldn’t be a debate.
McVegan and Reggie McVeggie were literal clowns who were causing McDonald’s a whole lot of grief. At that point, McDonald’s had to make a choice. The natural inclination—the obvious strategy—was to get rid of the clowns, to silence them.
Indeed, that’s what McDonald’s tried to do. That’s when something weird happened. By attacking McVegan, McDonald’s was only shining light on Reggie McVeggie, only giving him more prominence and inadvertently amplifying the narrative. And McVegan was simply more fun and more hip than McDonald’s.
All of a sudden T-shirt and sticker orders were coming in from around the world.
That’s when Ori had a fundamental realization: as the under-dog, it’s easier to engage in a war of narratives than it is to win a debate on the merits.
Because McVegan was inclusive, because anyone could be a part of it, there was no one (other than McDonald’s) who was terribly offended by it or set against it. After a number of positive news stories broke, reporters were calling to get the McVegan side of the story. But rather than engage in a debate, Ori dressed up as Reggie McVeggie and held a press conference.
The next day McDonald’s dropped its case.
Now, what if McDonald’s had chosen a different strategy? Rather than trying to win the debate, what if it had recognized that it was engaged in a battle of narratives?