Greener Campaign

I was not a fan of the term “Going Green” when we decided to reduce the use of papers in our operation. I personally felt that we were trying to wear too big a hat but actually doing too little to preserve the environment. I also observed that too many companies loosely use the term “Going Green” as their marketing campaign without having real substance to the environment; this fact bothered me too.

Truly love green?

But when we finally decided to stop printing manuals, I didn’t stop my COO, Ms Norana from using the term. I said yes to "Going Green" with some hesitation. My submission was due to the following reasons:

Firstly, I always thought life without a larger meaning is a waste. The same goes to activities. Activities can only be lifted to the height of a campaign by some underlying values or given meanings. Larger meaning is always associated with larger responsibility, and I thought, if our staff are willing to bear a larger responsibility, I shouldn’t discourage them.

Secondly, we did not simply dump everything into a DVD without any concern of its presentation to our clients. Users would find our content in this single DVD much more comprehensive than what they can hope for in a single user manual. All in all, it took the Brand Building Department three months to complete the task.

Thirdly, once we want to upgrade an activity into a campaign level, the "Going Green" concept should also be enlarged to a wider scope, not just confined to user manuals and boxes; hence, it will slowly be extended to products and system process in the company level, in order to cultivate the lifestyle in one’s own private life. You have to lead by example; that’s the way I count it.

Going Digital

Fourthly, “Going Green” for user manual means “Going Digital”. Besides the digital format in DVDs and in websites, we should also think of extending it into an eBook format too, which can be accessible by an iPad, a Kindle reader or any tablets that are using Android (Honeycomb). That should be our next step.

But irrespective of all the above reasons, when Ms Nisha, our copywriter forwarded me the draft announcement to be printed on the inlay of the DVD cover, I needed to confess that, “Years ago, we began this discussion on "Going Green", but eventually dropped the idea for we thought that without a printed user-manual in hand, we may cause some difficulty among our users. But when eBook/digital books were reported outsold hardcover books in the year 2010, this idea of Going Green quickly rekindled.”

And the money we save from this Going Green campaign would definitely be used to enhance and speed up some of our FingerTec Practical Branding process which I’m very much looking forward to!

by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ