Mind Over Matcha: The Battle Against Consumer Misconceptions

The surprising strength of consumer beliefs and the uphill battle for truth in the world of matcha marketing.

Ceremonial grade matcha is more popular in the United States than ever, which baffles me considering it’s not a real thing. Go to Japan and ask for a bowl of ceremonial grade matcha. Rather than a frothy, foamy bowl of green tea goodness, you’ll get blank stares and confused looks.

What makes it so popular in the US is that American vendors and marketers have made it so. Leaning on over 130 years of history behind “ceremonial tea” in the West, they created the perception that anything of quality high enough to be used in the Japanese tea ceremony must be good.

Thus, “ceremonial grade” was born.

Since my introduction to matcha in 2018, I’ve been a staunch opponent of the term. I firmly believed we should fight ceremonial grade in favor of educating consumers on what separates quality matcha from green tea dust. I believed, if we could just reach the misled matcha lover with the message of true tea, the scales would fall from their eyes and they would dump their cup of green-flavored water into the nearest gutter.

Then I read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout and everything changed–I realized marketing isn’t a battle of truth; it’s a battle of perceptions. 

Ries and Trout’s book showed me there’s little hope for a world without ceremonial grade matcha. Two passages in particular, the first in the Law of the Mind and the second in the Law of Perception, hit me like an iron kettle upside the head.

First:

“Once a mind is made up, it rarely, if ever, changes. The single most wasteful thing you can do in marketing is try to change a mind.”

Second:

“There is no objective reality. There are no facts. There are no best products. All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of the customer or prospect. The perception is the reality. Everything else is an illusion.”

I’ve been a marketer for 13 years and I’ve never seen the nature of marketing revealed in such stark terms. I’ve seen first hand how ideas about businesses or products get out into the market and become entrenched in the mind of the consumer. I’ve tried convincing, cajoling, debating, and arguing in favor of the truth. 

When I worked at Discord I used to go to large gaming conventions to work our booth. I met all kinds of gamers who would stop by to hang out. Talking to them about their experience using Discord, I would listen as they confidently told me things about the company or product I knew to be blatantly false. I watched them argue with the CTO himself about the tech Discord was built on, claiming things like Discord’s voice technology wasn’t as good as TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or Mumble.

I quickly realized, no matter the reasons they gave, many gamers were simply afraid of change. They didn’t want to leave the comfort of their IRC channels or cancel their dedicated TeamSpeak servers. Meanwhile, they watched as many of their friends, guilds, and clans defected to Discord en masse and decided to change reality rather than change themselves.

Tea is not immune to this phenomenon. 

Before the Japanese began to export tea to the States in the mid-1800s, it was China who filled America's teacups. During that time, the Chinese developed a practice of dyeing their green tea to keep it looking fresh and green by the time it landed in the States. The practice was so prevalent that Americans became convinced dyed green tea was better than the real thing. Attempts to shift this preference by educating the public on how tea was consumed in China failed. No amount of convincing could change the American tea drinker’s mind.

William Alcott, an author on the subjects of education and health and a vocal tea critic, did not blame the Chinese for the practice. Rather, he felt Americans were to blame, for they “must have tea” and the Chinese were “ready to furnish them with it”.

When the Japanese began to produce tea specifically for export to the American market, the tea they sent was closer to what the Japanese themselves consumed–unadulterated steamed sencha. However, the Chinese experts the Japanese hired felt the Japanese must do things differently to find greater success in the States.

First, the Chinese believed additional tea roasting was required at the end of the process. The final roast, which changed the taste of the tea considerably, was critical to prevent mold from ruining tea before it could reach American shores.

Second, they insisted that the Japanese dye their tea, as was common practice in China. The Japanese balked at the idea but eventually relented. I believe they had no choice–the Chinese had already spent nearly a century forming American perceptions with dyed green tea. 

Preference for dyed tea showed up in the New York Times in 1883, where a journalist reported on the subject of imported teas and the use of coloring agents. In his article, the journalist portrayed uncolored tea as having a “dirty, yellowish, black or deep brown color”. He went on to express understanding that the merchants would naturally add color to make their green tea more pleasing in the eyes of the consumer.

As another reporter in the Chicago Daily Tribune observed in 1873, it is a “curiosity of the tea trade and of human nature”, that Americans deliberately prefer lower quality, dyed tea sold at a high price versus higher quality, uncolored tea at a lower price. He called American tea drinkers "hardened and depraved" in their tastes and likened them to whiskey drinkers.

It’s no surprise attempts to turn Americans toward authentic Japanese green tea failed–American tea sensibilities were already damaged beyond repair. When presented with the real thing, they didn’t want it. I believe they still don’t. To this day, tea is acceptable to Americans only when served in tea bags. Matcha is desirable for its health benefits; not for the unique experience of Japanese tea and culture it offers. The electric frother is America's preferred tool for making matcha, not the bamboo whisk (chasen).

Yet, specialty Japanese tea vendors persist in the attempt to dislodge misconceptions from the mind of the American tea drinker. Theirs is a noble effort and may succeed over time. However, even without 130 years of history to balance on the other side of the equation, there are other problems to consider.

For starters, Starbucks, Jade Leaf, Blue Bottle, and their ilk push millions of dollars into marketing ceremonial grade matcha, reaching more people in a day than some specialty vendors reach in a year. All that money serves to reinforce the perception of ceremonial grade matcha, not reverse it.

Matcha options from a brand selling thousands of units per day on Amazon. This is what we’re up against.

What’s worse is the impact of all this marketing on matcha’s brand and consumer price sensitivity. If Walmart sells ceremonial grade matcha as low as $0.28 per gram and Target as low as $0.22 per gram, what will the consumer think when they see Kettl’s entry-level matcha (notably missing the ceremonial grade label) costs over $1.00 per gram? My bet is something like: “I can get the same thing for a quarter of the price.”

Meanwhile, most specialty tea vendors have little to no budget for marketing outside product sample costs. They rely heavily on word of mouth and organic social media to find new customers–a slow but powerful way to build a business if you can stay solvent long enough for it to work.

Furthermore, each vendor acts in isolation and not as a unified force, doing the same job educating customers over and over again from their own individual perspective, further muddying the waters. They don’t have a choice–without ceremonial grade available as an anchor, they have to come up with something else.

Pretty picture, but what is “craft” matcha? Is it different from ceremonial grade? What do either of these terms mean? I don’t know but it’s provocative–it gets the people going!

With such limited resources, they’re bailing water out of the ship with a Dixie cup while waves pushed by larger brands crash over their heads.

The specialty Japanese tea vendor’s best-case scenario is investing to create new tea drinkers and educating them over time. It’s slow, expensive, and difficult work, which will take years with no guarantee it will work or that their business will survive to see the tides shift.

So what are we to make of all of this? Ceremonial grade is here to stay and it’s more powerful than I imagined. I asked myself what I would do if I were in a position to make a change. I decided we need to lean into ceremonial grade. To do so, we’ll need participation from everyone involved.

We need to make a lasting change–we need a matcha movement.

True change must be systemic, which is why I believe we need an industry-wide effort to standardize matcha that includes everyone from the farmers and producers to the vendors to the Japanese government. Such an effort is daunting and I had no idea where to begin with such a sweeping vision. 

To my surprise and delight, I discovered the effort is already under way in Japan. However, many hurdles still have to be overcome. We’ll explore what those are in my next piece and how the Japanese tea industry is adapting to the world of ceremonial grade matcha.