Climate change

I was recently reading the October 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review. Its key focus was climate change.

On page 23 Michael L Porter and Forest L Reinhardt say “A company needs to understand the emissions it causes its business partners to produce, as well as those it generate itself: Both types are important targets for reduction.”

For a while now, I have been an advocate of businesses improving their understanding of their relationships with their suppliers. So many businesses undertake customer/client and staff satisfaction research, but miss out on improving their understanding of their suppliers. As cash flow is one of the main ways that a small growing business can fall over, understanding and improving their relationships with suppliers is critical. If one of your key suppliers is changing their focus, producing in an environmentally damaging way or not aligned with your philosophy then these aspects could significantly impact your business through a change in quality, timeliness of delivery, service, or decreased customer/client satisfaction from an increased desire for environmentally sustainable suppliers themselves.

I suggest business leaders take an active stance on this by getting feedback from their suppliers either formally or informally. You can then assess whether they are the right supplier for you, and if they are, then you can use in your marketing that this is one of the selection criteria for you in selecting a supplier.

Simple marketing working

We had a stand at the Australian Businesswomen’s Network Expo last weekend.

In the planning for it we talked about ways we could simply communicate with everyone there. We already had bright red bags with our logo on it (you can see them out and about at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/triberesearch/ ) and I remembered that at previous ABN Expos a bag wasn’t handed out until the end. So people walk around uncomfortably carrying lots of brochures, notebooks and samples.

We made a book filled with articles we have written and put it with other information into 100 bags. People were coming to our stand and asking for a bag so they could free up their arms and it gave us an opportunity to talk about what we do.

There were about 230 people at the Expo, so by the end of the day almost every second person was walking around with our bags. You can see the impact in our photos, a link is on our home page [click above]