Advertising and Sale of the SustainaBundy Guide
Hey - a lot was covered today in the informal get together at the Teaspoon. I have to say that was one tasty cappuccino. One thing we touched on was advertising in and selling the Guide. This can be done in several ways. Firstly we need to sell advertising for certain businesses. They give us some money and we print their ad. However when we have the guides printed we need to be able to distribute them, going back to some of the advertisers to display them near the register. We would then need to keep tabs on how many they sell and collect money back from them.
One option is for those businesses with frequent retail traffic to buy advertising and the guide up front. Rather than $10 for a quarter ad - or however much it works out to be - they just buy X amount (put a minimum on this of 20 or so) of guides at a discount from the RRP. Then we deliver the guides to them and we don't need to worry about collection of any funds. They sell them and keep all proceeds. And we don't waste valuable time and fossil fuel chasing them all down.
It sounds a bit weird written down but I swear it makes good sense in my head when I thought about it on the drive home.
Dean.
SustainaBundy
Want to join this group?
To get started, you'll need to create an account - or, if you already have an account on this website, login.
User login
Who's online
July 21st, 2007
so in other words...
...if we determine that the retail price of the guide should be $2, we sell them to advertisers for, say, $1.50 each, minimum order of 20 guides. Then when they're printed, we deliver their order and the advertisers sell them to their customers for $2. So in a sense they'd pay for advertising and get stock for free (or they pay for stock and get advertising for free, however you wanna put it). We'd have to make sure they understand that we can't buy back any unsold stock.
Something to consider: if the advertisers choose to sell the guide for, say, $4 instead of $2, they're pocketing a lot of profit and we are missing out on proceeds that could go to future SB projects.
In any case it'll depend on what our final quote is for the guide. If it's going to cost $7 per guide for printing then this will change the numbers we're dealing with significantly - it's important that the price is reasonable for the end customer who will be buying and using the guide.
As gaya pointed out, in order to be truly useful to the public the directory should include all appropriate businesses, whether they advertise with us or not. So like a phone book, the directory portion of the guide can include single line listings that include business name, address and phone, sorted by business type. These line listings would be free, with 1/4, 1/2 or full page ads available for sale. We can actively promote around town the fact that you can be listed in the SB guide for free if your business is environmentally responsible - I would hope that will generate a lot of interest and we won't have to chase all of these businesses down ourselves! Then once they contact us we can talk to them about advertising in the guide as well. I'll start working on a press release/flyer thingie that we can use for promotion.