Between markets and parlours: the gadgets to reduce

Eleonora Anello

Among the most successful local campaigns in the European Week for Waste Reduction, which ended Saturday November 29, 2009, those have combined the strategy of the incentive with the "natural", as the trade in organic products, are among the more features and more successful.

Between artisans products and organic foods, in Mazzini Place, in Casale Monferrato (Piedmont, Italy), in the marketplace "Il Paniere", the social cooperative SENAPE, Saturday 21, has continued the project MIMOSA (“Put on moving every shopper again”): a sewing workshop open for all to learn to create its own shopping bag with tissue recovery, with materials that were dumped in landfill.Were sewn hundreds of shopping bags that were then used not only to the “Paniere” but also to shop RiciCuci throughout the period of the Week. So, for every purchase, the consumer could get a complimentary an useful gift. We asked Mirella Ruo, a founding member of Senape, why it had chosen the gadget as an incentive: «I personally believe that the premium can be made more effective communication strategy and, although in a different way, to reward the virtuous and who it has become is useful both to achieve the goal we had set himself. The possibility of recognition stimulates the individual to act to obtain it, see also recognized his efforts to pursue these urges. The distribution was a chance to talk with people, mostly women, about the usefulness of reducing waste and the various strategies that already are taking a number of citizens and to probe their habits».

The incentive is a fundamental lever for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of qualitative and quantitative performances of individuals. So, better to reward the virtuous or who should be? And above all, what value should have the prize? Is it important that it be useful?

At these answers responds Paolo Mogno, property owner of the Ecobottega, a bio shop in Salzano (Venice, Italy) that has successfully participated in the European campaign: «The Week seems made for our shop that is born to give real opportunities to citizens to purchase less waste. We thought the premium (the discount) just to simulate the usual offerings of large retailers, but this time the products on offer are those which permit the reduction of waste at source. A promotion then economic and cultural that rewards who are already virtuous, but who has the main objective of bringing who have yet to become. We noticed it a great willingness by people to accept forms of sales as our that avoiding packaging and the disposable».

The gift is therefore a strong force on the sale of the product because its representation is always positive, both conscious and unconscious. Why did you choose to “honour” your guests with a candy?
«The sweet, easily and immediately attainable, is the symbol for excellence of the prize that is given to the child who has understood the lesson and that was good. So we would like to reward our customers with this simple but evocative gesture because I really think they are "good" find the strength to escape the temptations of the "comfort" of the supermarket».