bgreen's Guerrilla Marketing plan

 

Over the last week or so I've done a couple of investor presentations, and one of the slides I always get questions on is the Marketing Plan. We aim to spend as little money as possible, avoid bulk media and get a big impact.

Sounds good. Now, how do you do the impossible? Well, using Guerrilla Marketing. People nowadays have low tolerance threshold for anything standard, plus it's expensive. We us publicity by word of mouth, events, stunts, interactive marketing, press releases, social networks, you name it as long as it's non-standard. I've just found this over at http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/ for some great examples.

Ideas welcome!

International polling Dec 2010 - we're back with a bang

The RIWI Corporation is a highly-respected, Canada-based polling organisation which undertakes internet polling on an international basis.

In December 2010 Barcelona Green undertook polling with our friends at RIWI to help gauge market response to our proposed retail stores on a trans-European basis. Five questions were translated into local languages for, as well as our native Spain, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Russia, Turkey and the Ukraine. Breakdown results per country were also provided, which largely reinforced the trans-Europe trends.

We are still going over the results detail but feel that the conclusions drawn from the poll overwhelmingly support our strategy and business model, and we therefore wanted to share the initial findings with you as soon as possible:

- 41% of respondents realise they're responsible for taking action, not government or business

- 60% of respondents would buy our goods

- Around half the people who are prepared to buy environmentally, acknowledge they will act only if we make it easy for them

- Top barriers to buying for respondents are:

1. Don't know what/where to buy

2. No explanation of products

3. No established brands

4. Poor shopping experience

Total of these: 64.9%. If we solve these problems – which we do – we are removing barriers to buying for 64.9% of the population.

- As many people want to buy in a store as online. Interestingly, the percentage who prefer a store roughly agree with those people who think shopping experience and goods explanation important. However, this does not mean that online-preference buyers will not buy in a store as well! It also neglects the “push-pull effect”: that is, we believe there are customers who say they want to buy online (pull buying) rather than in-store (push buying) when polled, but never actually bother to get up and do it!

- As long as it is less than 50€ and the product ultimately pays for itself, purchase price is not important to 58% of respondents. Great news: this vindicates our comparatively high margins.

- Some customers seemed a little confused by what our name meant, but this was much less of an issue in Spain and we don’t see it as a highly significant issue. We will monitor this and change it if we see that it makes a difference in our marketing.

So, as you can see, the results are pretty exciting and back up what we have said in our presentations to date.

We also have a number of fundraising meetings planned for February and March, so: bring it on!

Green up your life - bgreen gets new strapline

We love our new strapline! We're sad like that. Another important change as we get market-ready.

Sainsbury speaks out in favour of a proper debate on GM foods on the BBC

A very sensible statement from the head of British supermarket giant Sainsburys, Lord David Sainsbury - also the former Minister for Science and Technology.

This is a great example of what we stand for - green but with common sense. There is a massive food shortage. There is also a dogmatic stand against GM crops from many quarters of the green lobby which we don't agree with. Now, there is a strong need for regulation and ensuring that we don't upset delicate ecosystems, but that doesn't mean we have to ban these things.

Let's debate it like grown-ups instead and find a middle way. What do you think?

I Know What You Did Last Summer (part II)

Well here's another thing we've been working on: we've spent the last few months calling around our proposed suppliers for core products, starting to set up relationships, prices and checking out technical specs to make sure they fit to our very stringent selection criteria.

We also check up about:
- Seriousness of supplier and capacity for reliable delivery
- Attitude towards joint branding or private label goods.

I'm delighted to be able to tell you that so far the feedback has been very positive towards bgreen, and we have found a good (perhaps unusually good) reception towards the private label initiative, which we put down to the fact that many of these companies are SMEs like us, who want to be flexible and grow with us.

So it's looking good for a launch next year. Now all we need is the money! More about that later.

bgreen commits to joining One Per Cent For The Planet

We're back, and we've been busy. Over the next week or two we'll be updating you on everything that's gone on during the summer. As a taster of this, here's an update regarding the excellent 1% FTP initiative.

The centrepiece of our original plan to “walk the walk” in our commitment to the environment and to social entrepreneurship was a plan to donate 5% of our net profits to charity. However, we were impressed after a meeting with one of our bgreen Advisory Board (and IESE MBA) Hervé Humbert, with his company Bloospring’s association with One Per Cent For The Planet, an international scheme to have companies give 1% of their turnover to charity. It has many adherents, including the celebrated singer/songwriter Jack Johnson. This is a clearly a significant commitment, and we want it to be - while we clearly wouldn’t be able to join this scheme before turning a profit, we decided that a well-recognised scheme would give more solidity and credibility to our commitment, and therefore have decided to commit to joining the scheme as soon as we are in profit.

We want to be held to our commitments by our investors and employees, to do what we say we will, so this commitment is now written into the Business Plan and we expect everyone to hold us to account.

Work-life balance - how we need to start thinking

As a slight tangent to our usual stuff, I thought this might be of interest to bgreen supporters, as we think it's important that you embed the right values in the company from day 1. It's a short, irreverent and insightful TED talk on balancing life and work.



In it, Nigel makes the devastatingly accurate point that the whole terms of our debate seem to forget the "elephant in the room", that some jobs are quite simply incompatible with having a fulfilling life outside work.

Excellent and also very funny. Enjoy.