Obamapreneurs: The Economist Gives Virgance Some Love

Virgance campaign Carrotmob uses the positive incentive of collective buying power to influence companies

One of my favorite "to watch" organizations out there is Virgance. Named after a term from Star Wars, Virgance finds highly promising campaigns and takes them to scale around the country. The company, which is a for profit, finds creative monetization strategies with each of its campaigns.

This week's Economist wrote a story about Virgance titled "For-Profit Activism." The story talks about two of their campaigns: 1BOG and Carrotmob. 1BOG ("One Block Off the Grid") gets entire neighborhoods to go solar at once by harnessing collective buying power to reduce the cost of transition. Carrotmob (the opposite of boycott) rewards companies for ethical practices through group purchasing pledges.

Their premise is that while not every campaign will take off, some each year will and those campaigns will provide the funding to grow the company. The Economist article inspired a post on the great Frog Design blog suggesting that it was an early example of "Obamapreneurship," a marketing driven, transparency focused new world of business and activism.

While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and “activating” the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good, for profit. Marketing, as the “voice” of business, is THE interface in a time when interface is everything. Marketing is the software. And software drives the value of products.

I think that's very true. But I also think its important to recognize (not that author Tim Leberecht wasn't) that it also seems clear that great marketing which supports a great product are more connected than ever before. With higher bullshit barriers, consumers aren't just seduced by marketing. Zappos, one of the companies that's redefined how to use social media marketing, provides great shoes with incredible service. Apple, one of the universally recognized great marketers of the early era has (love them or hate them) passion-inspiring products. Obama's offer of change was incredibly well-articulated, but it also had a pretty incredible political product in Obama behind it. Change didn't work so well for Romney, or Hillary, or McCain...or Palin. You differentiate not only by connecting your narrative to your customers, but by actually being different.

When it comes to business, I like Virgance's model because it's all about taking a slice of the real value created in exchange for organizing and unlocking that value. More people buying from sustainable companies with Carrotmob is real value creation. People going solar and saving money doing it is real value creation. It makes sense intuitvely that the organizer would have a stake in that value. I dig it and I hope the model works.