by David Anttony
Definitions of some English words can change quite rapidly these days. In the recent past the meaning of words was often very fixed. Today the meaning can change in the blink of an eye. With faster and newer ways to exchange ideas such as Twitter and with wider and more culturally, socially and educationally dissimilar groups connecting together – words are put back on the anvil of evolution and changed into something new and more reflective of current life.
There is a growing global movement where consumers are asking businesses to take care of the things that they care about. The request is mainly tacit and despite it being an ironic request it non-the-less signals that we are in a time of change. Consumers these days want their ‘goodies’ but they don’t want the environment to be destroyed in the creation of their ‘goodies’. They want cheap products but they do not want workers to suffer to create those cheap products.
There may not seem an answer to this complex puzzle and yet one actually exists. It exists in the reforging of a simple single word – GET. Today there is a new movement of people wanting to get but give at the same time and they are reforging it’s meaning into the word GIVE.
Every day automated email notices arrive in my inbox from Google Alerts for two keywords – BOGO and B1G1. I see all the new places these words are turning up on the Internet. Little by little these two words are gaining a their new meaning as more and more people take up the Buy One Give One cause.
The B1G1 and BOGO acronyms both stand for Buy One GET One free. You buy one and you get given an extra one for free.
If you look on Wikipedia you will find these definitions for BOGO (there isn’t a definition yet for B1G1) –
* An acronym in the retail industry that stands for Buy One Get One. For example, you could say “Buy 1 DVD, Get 1 FREE!
* An acronym in slang British that stands for Britons Of Greek Origin or Greek Britons.
* Bogo, Cebu, a city in central Philippines.
* An alternate name for the Bilen ethnic group of Ethiopia or their language, Blin.
* Norway, a village in Norway.
* The mascot of the ITESM CEM.
* BogoMips, an unscientific measurement of CPU speed
* BogoMips, an unscientific measurement of CPU speed
BOGO lights
There is a business in the USA called SunLight Solar founded by Mark Bent. He has created a special torch that not only is an amazing and sturdy solar-powered light, his company also gives a free torch to a those in need in developing nations for each one bought. If you look on their website you will learn about their “BOGOlight”.
“The BoGo – our Buy one/Give one – program has successfully provided lights to many, many thousands of people in the developing world, changing lives because of your purchase and participation.” – BOGOlight.com
Mark Bent has managed to flip the meaning of the BOGO acronym upside down. For Mark along with thousands of his customers, BOGO now means Buy One GIVE One. A light is given whenever one is sold. Now each sale supports people in remote parts of the world who don’t have the benefit of electricity. They can now tap into solar power support themselves.
There are many other well known and less well know businesses now doing Buy One Give One giving or transactional giving as it is becoming known. Some of the famous ones are One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) and TOM’S Shoes. Some of the less well-known ones (in the USA at least) are based in New Zealand, Australia and the UK – Earthstar Publishing, Maple Muesli, Blinds Couture, Figure 8 Body Chains, Sunsplash Homes, Honestly Women magazine and Thavibu Gallery based in Thailand are just a handful of special businesses that are heading the Buy One Give One movement.
Many Buy One Give One businesses are coming together under the single brand banner of Buy1GIVE1, a Singaporean based social enterprise which is becoming the home of transaction based giving. Any business can now choose to be part of Buy One Give One giving with ease. It’s like a CSR ‘plug-in’ to allow a business to start giving from each and every sale today – starting from just one cent. It is now not even a matter of giving an equivalent product to someone else. Instead it is about giving to a charity project that is in resonance with a company’s business activity. For example a magazine publisher can not support the planting of a tree every time they sell a subscription, a restaurant can feed a child for each meal sold, a TV store can gift a cataract blind person with the gift of sight (Get Vision-Give Vision), and a builder or property developer can build a budget home for those in need who have lost their homes in a disaster (Buy1BUILD1) – the list is only limited by imagination.
Something special is happening these days as more and more people are switching onto giving and ‘citizen brands’ as a part of their everyday experience. The 2008 Edelman Goodpurpose global study of consumer attitudes reveal that almost seven in 10 (68%) consumers would choose to remain loyal to a brand during a recession if it supports a good cause, and 71% say that when they think about the economic downturn, they have either given the same or more time and money to good causes. This very same study highlighted some other major things as well like :
* Half (52%) of consumers globally are more likely to recommend a brand to others when it supports a good charity cause over one that does not.
* 54% would sing the praise’s of a brand to promote their products if there was a good cause behind it.
* Consumers are now voicing a clear desire for marketers to associate their brands to social causes. 42% say that if two products or services were of a similar quality and price, commitment to a cause outranks factors like innovation, design and brand loyalty when selecting one brand over another.
Transforming Getting into Giving
In the minds of consumers, Buy One GIVE One is expected to replace Buy One GET One as the new global giving movement led by Buy1GIVE1 spreads. Certainly with the massive sales results and consumer demand shown for companies like BOGOlights, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and TOMS Shoes, this tide will continue to spread and grow.
I did a recent Google search to find the top 25 keywords associated with the keywords BOGO and B1G1. The results were interesting indeed seeing none of them contained the word Give. You can see the results below. It will be interested to repeat this experiment in 12 months time to see what changes. Consumers are now starting to drive significant change and despite them wanting to receive free gifts (as in traditional BOGO/B1G1), they equally want to help others and the environment. This feeling is validated by 2008’s Goodpurpose global study.
Here are the search results :
Free, networking, boots, groups, music, dallas, togo themes, wallpapers, buy, applications, skins, values, coupon, African, gift, photography, blogging, discount, sharing, shopping, pics, join, prose
Transactional or transaction based giving
Unlike normal charitable giving Buy One Give One giving is transactional. What is meant by that is : every time you buy something you give something. In the case of SunNight Solar they give a physical light for every light sold. In most cases, businesses that become part of this special form of transaction-based giving, give in a different way. At Buy1GIVE1, giving can start from just USD 1c contribution per sale. At this amount no business in the world can say they cannot give and 100% contributed goes to the cause.
The amount of money that is contributed isn’t the focus with Buy1GIVE1 transaction based giving. The focus instead is on the story and sharing the simple joy of giving. After all, if you think that 1c isn’t a lot to give and would not make much of a difference think again.
From its origins in Ethiopia, where the main coffee production is still from wild coffee tree forests, coffee consumption has spread globally. Brazil is still by far the largest coffee producer in the world producing on average 28% of the world’s total coffee. In 2006 Brazil produced enough coffee to make 216,400,000,000 (216 billion four hundred million) espresso coffees. If we were to calculate across global production then we get a daily global consumption of around 2,117,416,830 cups of coffee – wow. The figures are somewhat hard to track down but lets guess that 40% of the world’s coffee is sold and consumed in coffee shops then we would get that 846,966,732 cups are sold commercially each day globally – nearly 900 million. This would equate to about 185,485,714 cups in the US on its own seeing they purchase around 21% of the world’s coffee.
If we considered the impact of the coffee industry alone taking up Buy1-Give1, imagine now that for every cup of coffee sold a child in a developing region like Sub-Sahara Africa received clean drinking water from a well and it only costing 1cent to do this. Surely any coffee shop could afford to contribute this amount from the sale of a single cup of coffee. Imagine the different that this one action alone would make in the world.
Transaction-based giving is the story of a thousand-mile journey starting with a single step. Digging a well costs a few thousand dollars, however when you break the cost down it only takes the sale of a single cup of coffee to give clean water to a single person for a day1. This is the incredible and simple power of transactional giving. It is like the compound interest of giving – a little turns into a huge amount very quickly.
Of course any company anywhere in the world can apply transaction-based giving to any of their products or services and do it on their own as some are like TESCO in the UK giving school uniforms to kids in Africa from every uniform purchased in the UK. And yet if companies choose to come together under a commonly recognised banner they have a greater effect. The ripple that one company creates adds to that of another and soon the tidal wave of change flows out into the world benefitting all the companies in the movement. This is the power of giving and doing things together.
The final power of Buy One Give One transaction based giving is that everyone wins – the consumer wins – at no extra cost to themselves they have made a difference through their purchasing choices – the business wins in so many ways – and the worthy cause or charity wins because they can now receive small amounts from many sources all aggregated and paid as a lump sum from a single source if done through the Buy1GIVE1 service.
A new start – a new world – new thinking
If you check Wikipedia today you should find that a new definition has been added for BOGO. It is time for a change. A change from focusing on GETTING to focusing on GIVING. The subtlety in the words that we use so often point to a deeper underlying meaning. I added this small addition to Wikipedia, “… an acronym in the marketing industry that stands for Buy One GIVE One.”
Just imagine our world where every time you shopped and bought something you gave something – automatically and seamlessly. This is the simple joyful magic of transaction based giving.
This is the world I want to be part of.
And remember – you don’t ‘get’ giving till you get giving.
References :
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee
http://www.dep.org.uk/globalexpress/13/page1.htm
http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html
http://www.tesco.com/greenerliving/what_we_are_doing/ethical_clothing.page
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee
http://www.goodpurposecommunity.com/
http://www.tesco.com/greenerliving/what_we_are_doing/ethical_clothing.page
Footnotes: 1 The daily cost for clean well water per person is calculated by taking the average cost to dig a well then dividing that amount by its average expected life without major maintenance then divided it by the number of people in the community benefitting from the well on a daily basis.
About the Author:
Any business can now take part in
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