Definitions of English words often change quite rapidly these days. In the not-to-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 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 from Google Alerts for two keywords - B1G1 and BOGO. I see all the new places these words are being used on the Internet. I can now see that the new meaning of these words is coming alive 'poco a poco' -little by little.
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.
If you look on Wikipedia you will find these definitions for BOGO (there isn't a definition yet for B1G1 - there will be soon when I write one!) :
* 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.
* Norway, a village in Norway.
* Norway, a village in Norway.
* The mascot of the ITESM CEM.
* Bogosort, an ineffective sorting algorithm
* BogoMips, an unscientific measurement of CPU speed
BOGO lights
There is an organisation in the USA called SunLight Solar founded by a gentleman called Mark Bent. He has created a special torch that not only is an amazing and robust solar-powered light, his company also gives a free torch to a family in need in developing nations for each one purchased. 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 flipped the BOGO acronym upside down when he started to use the word as part of his product name. For him now and the thousands who buy his lights, BOGO today means Buy One GIVE One. Each person gets to give a light every time they buy one for themselves. So now with each sale people who do not have the benefit of electricity can tap the power of the sun to support them in their lives.
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.
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.
* and 54% would champion a brand to promote a product 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.
Getting becoming 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 Google search on the 25 topmost key words connected with the keyword BOGO as an experiment to see what would show up. The results were interesting so I have displayed them below. You may notice that right now the word Give doesn't show up. It will be interested to do this test again in twelve months time to see what changes. Consumers are now driving change and yes they want to receive free gifts (traditional B1G1/BOGO) but equally they also want to give to others or see others being given to.
Here's the 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 contributed from each sale is not the point of focus with Buy1GIVE1 transaction based giving. The focus is instead on the story and sharing the simple joy of giving. In the end, if you think that 1c is not a lot to contribute and is unlikely to make much of a difference think again and consider the following idea.
Coffee consumption has spread globally and Brazil is by far the largest coffee producer in the world producing on average 28% of all coffee grown. In 2006 Brazil grew enough coffee to brew 216,400,000,000 (216 billion 400 million) espresso coffees! If we were to make this calculation across global production amounts then we get an amazing number for the daily global consumption of around 2,117,416,830 (2 billion 117 million) cups of coffee - wow! The figures are not easy to find but if we guessed that around 40% of the world's coffee is purchased in coffee shops then we would find that 846 million 966,732 cups are sold commercially each day globally - almost 900 million. This would equate to about 185 million cups in the US alone 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 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.
Everyone wins with Buy One Give One transaction based giving. 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 of course the charity cause wins because they are now able to receive small amounts from numerous sources aggregated and paid in a lump sum by Buy1GIVE1.
A new beginning
If you go and check Wikipedia.com today for the word BOGO you should find that a new definition has been added. It's time for a tide-change - a change from focusing on GETTING to working with GIVING. I added this small addition to Wikipedia's BOGO definition : "... 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://www.buy1-give1free.com/index.php/Partnering/Worthy-cause-charity-projects.html
http://www.buy1-give1free.com/index.php/Partnering/Worthy-cause-charity-projects.html
http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html
http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html
http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee
http://www.dep.org.uk/globalexpress/13/page1.htm
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. - 15336
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 from Google Alerts for two keywords - B1G1 and BOGO. I see all the new places these words are being used on the Internet. I can now see that the new meaning of these words is coming alive 'poco a poco' -little by little.
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.
If you look on Wikipedia you will find these definitions for BOGO (there isn't a definition yet for B1G1 - there will be soon when I write one!) :
* 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.
* Norway, a village in Norway.
* Norway, a village in Norway.
* The mascot of the ITESM CEM.
* Bogosort, an ineffective sorting algorithm
* BogoMips, an unscientific measurement of CPU speed
BOGO lights
There is an organisation in the USA called SunLight Solar founded by a gentleman called Mark Bent. He has created a special torch that not only is an amazing and robust solar-powered light, his company also gives a free torch to a family in need in developing nations for each one purchased. 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 flipped the BOGO acronym upside down when he started to use the word as part of his product name. For him now and the thousands who buy his lights, BOGO today means Buy One GIVE One. Each person gets to give a light every time they buy one for themselves. So now with each sale people who do not have the benefit of electricity can tap the power of the sun to support them in their lives.
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.
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.
* and 54% would champion a brand to promote a product 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.
Getting becoming 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 Google search on the 25 topmost key words connected with the keyword BOGO as an experiment to see what would show up. The results were interesting so I have displayed them below. You may notice that right now the word Give doesn't show up. It will be interested to do this test again in twelve months time to see what changes. Consumers are now driving change and yes they want to receive free gifts (traditional B1G1/BOGO) but equally they also want to give to others or see others being given to.
Here's the 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 contributed from each sale is not the point of focus with Buy1GIVE1 transaction based giving. The focus is instead on the story and sharing the simple joy of giving. In the end, if you think that 1c is not a lot to contribute and is unlikely to make much of a difference think again and consider the following idea.
Coffee consumption has spread globally and Brazil is by far the largest coffee producer in the world producing on average 28% of all coffee grown. In 2006 Brazil grew enough coffee to brew 216,400,000,000 (216 billion 400 million) espresso coffees! If we were to make this calculation across global production amounts then we get an amazing number for the daily global consumption of around 2,117,416,830 (2 billion 117 million) cups of coffee - wow! The figures are not easy to find but if we guessed that around 40% of the world's coffee is purchased in coffee shops then we would find that 846 million 966,732 cups are sold commercially each day globally - almost 900 million. This would equate to about 185 million cups in the US alone 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 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.
Everyone wins with Buy One Give One transaction based giving. 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 of course the charity cause wins because they are now able to receive small amounts from numerous sources aggregated and paid in a lump sum by Buy1GIVE1.
A new beginning
If you go and check Wikipedia.com today for the word BOGO you should find that a new definition has been added. It's time for a tide-change - a change from focusing on GETTING to working with GIVING. I added this small addition to Wikipedia's BOGO definition : "... 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://www.buy1-give1free.com/index.php/Partnering/Worthy-cause-charity-projects.html
http://www.buy1-give1free.com/index.php/Partnering/Worthy-cause-charity-projects.html
http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html
http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html
http://www.scfnw.org.uk/site/article183.html
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee
http://www.dep.org.uk/globalexpress/13/page1.htm
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. - 15336
About the Author:
Buy One Give One (B1G1) is now a global "movement" led by Buy1GIVE1 joining together charities, businesses and consumers in a unique way. Visit BOGO for updates. Add this to your site with links active and intact.
