Definitions of English words often change quite rapidly these days. In the not-too-distant past the definition of words was often set in concrete. Today the meaning can change in the blink of an eye. With new and faster ways to exchange ideas and with wider and more culturally, socially and educationally diverse groups connecting together – words are put back on the hard anvil of evolution and transformed into something new and more reflective of current life and living.
There’s a significant global movement happening where consumers are asking business to take care of the things they care about such as the less fortunate in society and the environment. The request is mainly tacit and despite it being an ironic request it by far indicates still that we are in a time of vast change. Consumers these days want their cake and eat it. They not only want cheap products, they also want the environment to be preserved and they want workers to be well looked after.
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 its 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.
B1G1 and BOGO, despite sounding like characters from a Marvel comic are acronyms for Buy One GET One free. You buy one and they give you an extra one for the same price.
Look up BOGO on Wikipedia.com (there isn’t a definition yet for B1G1) and you will discover these definitions for BOGO:
* 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.
* Bogosort, an ineffective sorting algorithm
* BogoMips, an unscientific measurement of CPU speed
BOGO light
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 those in need in developing nations for each one bought. If you look on their website you will learn about their “BOGOlight”.
BOGOlight.com. – “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.”
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 uniting under the common banner of Buy1GIVE1 run by a social enterprise based in Singapore. Buy1GIVE1 is the home of transaction-based giving. Any business based anywhere in the world can now start doing Buy One Give One giving with ease. It is becoming like a ‘CSR plug-in’ allowing a business to instantly start giving from each and every product or service sale, starting from just one cent. And it is no longer about giving an equivalent product to someone else; instead it is about contributing to a project that resonates with a company’s activities. So for example a restaurant can feed a child, a TV manufacturer can give a cataract blind person the gift of sight (Get Vision-Give Vision), a magazine publisher can plant a tree for every subscription and a builder can build a low-cost family home for those in need (Buy1BUILD1) – the list is endless.
The stats now add up saying consumers do care. The 2008 Goodpurpose global study of consumer attitudes revealed that nearly a huge 68% of consumers would remain dedicated to a brand during an economic slump if it supported a charity cause. This study also highlighted some other key points as well such as:
* 54% would promote a brand and its products if there was a good cause behind it.
* 52% of consumers globally are more likely to tell others of a brand when it supports a good charity cause over one that doesn’t.
* 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.
Turning 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, photography, blogging, discount, networking, African, boots, groups, music, dallas, togo themes, wallpapers, buy, applications, skins, values, coupon, gift, sharing, shopping, pics, join, prose
Transactional or transaction-based giving
Buy One Give One giving is transactional – every time you buy something, you give something. In the case of SunNight Solar, TOMS Shoes and OLPC they happen to give physical products of the same nature for everyone sold. However, in most cases, Buy1GIVE1 associated businesses give a charitable contribution from each sale. Giving can start from just a one-cent contribution per sales transaction and go up to thousands of dollars in the case of Buy1BUILD1. At 1cent any business in the world can afford to give from each sale especially when they also know 100% of the contribution 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 let’s 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’5,485,714 cups in the US on its own seeing they purchase around 21% of the world’s coffee.
Imagine now that for every cup of coffee sold a child in a developing region like Africa received drinking water from its own well and it costing only one US cent per person per day. Now any coffee shop could afford to contribute this amount from the sale of a single cup of coffee because it has a high profit margin sale. Imagine the different that this 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 can do transaction-based giving with any of its products or services and do it on their own as some are like TESCO in the UK giving school uniforms to kids in Africa in partnership with Save the Children. And yet if companies choose to join together under a commonly recognised banner/brand they can have a powerful effect. The ripple that a single company creates is added to that of another and the ripple grows into a tidal wave of giving. 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 beginning
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.”
Imagine a world where every time you buy you are giving a gift forward to someone in greater need than you. This is the magic of transactional giving – seamless and simple.
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://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html
http://www.goodpurposecommunity.com/
http://www.coffeepoet.com/2007/09/
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 benefiting from the well on a daily basis.
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