Definitions of words often change quite quickly these days. In the distant past the meaning of words was often set in stone. Today the meaning can change in a blink. With new faster ways to communicate with wider and more culturally, socially and education

There is a growing significant movement happening global where consumers are asking businesses to look after the things they care about such as the environment and the less fortunate in society. The request is still mainly tacit and despite it being an ironic request it still signals we are in a time of great change. Consumers these days want their ‘toys’ but they don’t want the environment to be destroyed in the creation of these. They want cheap products but they do not want workers to be paid a pittance to create the cheap products.

There does not seem to be an answer to this conundrum and yet one does exist. It exists in the recoining or reforging of a single word. This word is a simple one – GET. Today, new movements of people who want to get but give at the same time are reforging it. It is being transformed into the word GIVE.

Every day I receive a notice from Google Alerts for two words – B1G1 and BOGO. It tells me all the new places that 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’ [Italian: poco, little + a, by + poco, little].

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

* Bogosort, an ineffective sorting algorithm

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 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 transaction based giving as it is becoming known. Some of the famous ones are One Laptop Per Child and TOMS Shoes. Some of the less well-known ones (in the USA at least) are based in Australia, New Zealand and the UK – Maple Muesli, Blinds Couture, Earthstar Publishing, Figure 8 Body Chains, Honestly Women magazine, Sunsplash Homes and Thavibu Gallery based in Thailand are just a few special businesses that are leading the Buy One Give One movement in their parts of the world.

There are many Buy One Give One businesses now uniting under the common brand banner of Buy1GIVE1 managed by a Singapore based social enterprise which is becoming the home of transaction-based giving. Any business in the world can now integrate Buy One Give One giving with ease. It’s like a ‘CSR plug-in’ allowing a business to instantaneously start giving from each and every sale, starting from just 1 cent. It’s also no longer about giving an equivalent product to someone else. Instead it is about contributing to a project that resonates with a company’s activity. For example a restaurant can feed a child, a television retailer can give a cataract blind person the gift of sight (Get Vision-Give Vision), a magazine publisher can plant a tree every time they sell a subscription and a property developer can build a low-cost family home for those in need (Buy1BUILD1) – the list is simply endless.

There is something very special happening these days as more and more people are switching to giving and what are known as ‘citizen brands’ as a part of their everyday experience. In the 2008 Goodpurpose study of global consumer attitudes it reveals that almost 68% of consumers would choose to remain loyal to a brand during an economic downturn 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 study also highlighted some other key points as well such as:

* 52% of consumers globally are more likely to recommend a brand to others when it supports a good charity cause over one that doesn’t.

* 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.

* And going even further globally, consumers are voicing a strong desire for marketers to connect their brands to social causes or action. Forty-two percent say that if two products or services are of the same quality and price, commitment to a social purpose trumps factors like design, innovation and brand loyalty when choosing one product brand over another.

Getting becoming Giving

The new concept of Buy One GIVE One is starting to replace Buy One GET One as the global giving movement led by Buy1GIVE1 ripples out. Right now if you search for the terms B1G1 and BOGO you will find that websites that do Buy1-Give1 giving are on the first page of Google results. Certainly with the large consumer demand shown for products from companies like TOMS Shoes, BOGO lights and OLPC – One Laptop Per Child, this tide is set to continue and spread.

I did a recent Google search to find the 25 top key words associated with the keyword BOGO. The results were very interesting in that none of them currently contained the word Give. I have displayed the results below. It will be interested to repeat this test in twelve months time and see what changes. Consumers are starting to drive major change and despite still wanting to receive free gifts (as in traditional B1G1/BOGO), they equally want to help others and the environment. This sentiment is validated by the 2008 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

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 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’5 million cups in the US alone 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 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.

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 start

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://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

http://www.buy1-give1free.com/index.php/Partnering/Worthy-cause-charity-projects.html

http://www.tesco.com/greenerliving/what_we_are_doing/ethical_clothing.page

http://www.tesco.com/greenerliving/what_we_are_doing/ethical_clothing.page

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 Calculated by taking the average cost to dig a well, dividing it by its average expected life without major maintenance divided by the number of people in the community benefiting from the well on a daily basis.

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