The Coconut Creatives team attended the National Franchise Marketing Awards ceremony in London last Friday evening.

Coconut Creatives was pleased to attend the event with the Directors and Consultants from Franchise Your Business after assisting FYB on their stand at the International Franchise Exhibition in Olympia earlier that day.

Coconut Creatives founder, Sarah Dyer was invited to sit on the top table with John Hancock, Managing Director of Venture Marketing who organise the event, the National Advertising Sales Manager of the Daily Mail and the the expert team of Judges for the evening. Included within the judging pannel was a Chartered Institute of Marketing representative.

The evening included hilarious commedy from Frankie Boyle and concluded with dancing and the three attending Coconuts; Sarah, Sally Butters and Chris Cook were pleased to be some of the last guests to leave, along with ARC Media’s Fiona and Sam!

Coconut Creatives Sarah and Sally with the Franchise Your Business team at the National Franchise Marketing Awards.

Fair Trade Company Shared Earth has donated £10,000 for the creation of the first sustainable community centre in India. Managing Director Jeremy Piercy handed over the cheque to the John Lally International Foundation outside Shared Earth’s head office in York, which is to fund a new community centre in Goa.

John Lally was extremely active in the environmental movement before he died in his late 20’s. He persuaded the council to give over a disused landfill site as a conservation area, and helped to raise several hundred thousand pounds to set up the UK’s first eco community centre on the site. This now forms the template for the Goa project.

The new Goa centre in Moira, will be promoting environmental education, sustainability, community enterprise, recycling and agriculture for all the community and also includes a kindergarten. Using an old Portuguese-style house renovated to 21st century standards, the Centre will be carbon neutral forming a community base for environmental enterprises in agriculture, recycling, garbage collection and other small scale non-polluting industries.

Shared Earth actively campaign against the use of plastic bags with their jute bags made in India which boast a selection of logos such as ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’, ‘Use me till me bottom wears out’ and ‘Say No to Plastic Bags’. They also backed the Daily Mail’s Banish the Bag campaign which also formed part of their PR plan undertaken by Coconut Creatives.

“Fair Trade is making such a difference,” explains Jeremy. “Critics are quick to question whether the Fairtrade logo is just another way of businesses to profit. We are ensuring that the profits of our fairly traded goods directly benefit those communities that require assistance and this Goa project is a classic example.”

Shared Earth fans were delighted to see a Shared Earth jute bag being used on the Gavin and Stacey show on Sunday 6th April.

It was used in a scene with the actor Alison Steadman, who plays Pam; Gavin’s neurotic Essex mum, as she entered her house with her shopping stacked into one of Shared Earth’s reusable jute bags.

“We’re delighted to see the bags being used, especially on the TV,” comments Jeremy Piercy, founder of Shared Earth.
Shared Earth campaign heavily for the reduced use of plastic bags and currently offer the reusable jute bags in a variety of colours with different slogans including ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’, ‘Use me till me bottom wears out’ and ‘Say No to Plastic Bags’. They also backed the Daily Mail’s Banish the Bag campaign last month.

“We have always aimed to address the imbalance of wealth, working together with people from different cultures,” explains Jeremy who founded Shared Earth 1986 to increase the sales of fairly traded goods.

As well as being the UK’s largest independent retailer of non-food Fair Trade products, Shared Earth offer the best selection of recycled products, including bags made from crisp packets in bangladesh, toy cars made from tin cans in Madagascar, office stationery from computer boards in the UK, wall hangings from old saris in India and jewellery from recycled glass in Chile.

A selection of these products can be viewed at www.sharedearth.co.uk.

Article as featured in Making Money magazine April 2008…

Marketing communications has changed, not just for franchisors but for all businesses. While the rules to effective marketing haven’t changed, the creativity and choice of tools have.

There is such a vast range of communication tools to choose from, it can be confusing to reach a definitive decision. After all, we just want to choose a selection that are cost effective and will reach the target audience.

The power of the consumer
Many businesses now understand that people trust people and will trust the opinion of complete strangers on a blog site reporting back about the usability or quality of a new mobile phone or TV. You only have to look at Amazon to see that they are using other people’s buying behaviour to influence the current customer in such cases as ‘people who bought this item also bought…’

Consumer power
The increase in communication channels that are now available to us has increased the level of involvement and communication with other people and businesses. Ebay were one of the first to recognise this and harness the opportunity that it presented when it allowed customers feedback to have a direct impact on the business or person selling their goods on Ebay. This has led the change towards consumers trusting other consumers, based on previous experiences with that business.

The way businesses need to communicate to spread the word about their products or services has also changed. Quirky is now king in the digital world and plays an important role in building or tweaking brand image. Those businesses that harness the capabilities of digital communication channels will succeed, like the drum playing Cadbury Gorilla which has been bastardised into a whole range of other theme tunes by copycats. Or the 1 min 22 sec Quiksilver Dynamite YouTube clip that is extending the reach of the Quiksilver brand beyond the seaside. The ones that shock and surprise gain the attention in the digital world, as in the real world

How to grow your franchise network
If you are interested in growing your franchise network, the simplest way to do this is to communicate the benefits of your franchise package to the people who are most likely to buy it and influence other people to buy it too. The growth of relationship marketing through digital tools has become cheap and easy to execute. In the past, to test a new campaign would be timely and costly. New digital opportunities allow businesses (on a small or large scale) to carry out some small distinct tests which gain results that are fairly accurate and simple to measure. We regularly recommend and carry out such tests for our own clients.

ROI – Return on Involvment
To a certain extent, the web and digital tools are about ROI in a different sense – Return on Involvement. If you achieve regular involvement, you will eventually achieve traditional ROI – Return on Investment. It cannot be ignored that relationship marketing is absolutely essential and with additional tools available to analyse click behaviour, search terms, blog entries and other influencer networks it is now much easier to engage with your target audience and achieve results.