In his book ‘The Brand Innovation Manifesto’, John Grant talks about, ‘busting the trade-off in your market’…
‘It is almost a law of market development that breakthrough ideas come from overcoming a former trade-off: luxury made affordable and accessible; home convenience meals that taste like a restaurant; fast cars with good fuel economy.’
Grant goes on to say this is less about messaging and more about, ‘product inventions that really deliver — like the original Golf GTi being affordable but very fast’ (putting aside the issue of carbon emissions, just to illustrate the point).
In context of Social Value and the challenge of creating additional community benefits without seeing government contract values going up, ‘sharing economy principles’ are pivotal to busting this trade-off.
Applying sharing economy principles to Social Value
The principles that govern much of the technology in the ‘Sharing Economy’ can be boiled down to:
Tapping into existing capacity
Using technology to finding the optimal match between those that have spare capacity and those that need it.
Air BnB — rooms. Uber — taxis. Social Value Exchange — capacity building resources for communities.
We’d recommend Peers Inc by Robin Chase, ZipCar co-founder, for an excellent account of how these principles and the businesses that have best applied them (warts and all).
Our view is that sufficient numbers of government suppliers will have resources that are not being used and that could be put to more productive use by community organisations.
Meeting rooms. Staff sitting on the bench. Existing CSR budgets.
The Social Value Exchange drives suppliers to find these resources within their organisations and to put it to more productive uses in local community organisations. And the more suppliers share, the more government contracts they can win. And that is what drives them — the chance of winning more government contracts.
We’re pushing at an open door – most government suppliers have long standing commitments to community investment. We’re simply supporting them by creating a simple user journey and a great user experience.
Plus we’re enabling them from a business perspective — using our platform suppliers can create a direct link between existing CSR (and, by logical extension, their marketing budgets) and sales. This means suppliers can model the return on investment of CSR and marketing spend — squaring that circle and making CSR a genuine and tangible part of business strategy, because it has become a financial strategy.
