The social good company using social media to dominate

It all started with a plan to make something meaningful out of nothing.

University student Daniel Flynn, his then-girlfriend, now-wife Justine and his mate Jarryd Burns wanted to change the world like a lot of kids their age. Little did they know, they actually would. It would just take a long time.

The three of them are now behind the Australian company Thankyou, which has 38 social good products ranging from water, food, body care and beauty. The unusual part for a consumer product company? 100% of the profits go to help in the real world.

The journey to creating a new model in the consumer product industry wasn’t easy. The trio used a mix of virality, people power and good ideas to create the highly-popular Australian brand you see today.

How it all began

It was 2008 and Flynn came across some statistics that would change the course of his professional life. He read that 900 million people didn’t have access to clean water and that 4500 kids die every day from waterborne disease.

“I remember thinking as a 19-year-old kid who had never travelled ‘that can’t be right, the number can’t be that big.’ I knew global poverty was big, but I just didn’t have any idea of how dire the situation still was,” Flynn told Mashable Australia.

“I was just like, that is so wrong. Here I am in Melbourne, I had been to university, I was building my career. I had dreams, I had hopes and I could chase them, there are other kids that couldn’t chase theirs because they were collecting water.”

Shocking the idealistic young man further, he then discovered $50 billion was spent globally on bottled water. This number has doubled in the last eight years.

Flynn said these findings overwhelmed him and he came up with a somewhat naive dream: to create a water brand that gave its profits to international water projects. He called it Thankyou Water.

“Maybe there is a littlenaivepart of me that thinks things are possible,” he explained. “We live in a world where you have these two water extremes, so why isn’t there a brand where all the profit goes to funding water projects? And that began the adventure, it was a really simple thought: that I can’t do much as one person but maybe together we could. The money is already there.”

It wasn’t as easy as Flynn had first thought. In hisnaivety, he didn’t think through the reality of taking onsome of the biggest companies in the world, such as the all-mighty Coca Cola.

“The journey goes on a series of twists and turns, it started well when we got a factory that was interested in the company and we got a donation from recycling company Visy for $20,000 and that was kinda cool,” Flynn said, referring to the early days in 2008.

But by 2011 everything had fallen apart: their first product rollout was recalled due to damaged labels, they lost 350 stockists due to a factory supply issue and their distributor went bankrupt.

“That was pretty shattering for us,” Flynn said, in regards to the recall. “It took about three months to pull our products off the shelf and then go again. That was sort of the beginning of the three-year heartache, the three-year school of hard knocks.”

The huge successes and terrifying lows in the first years taught the trio and their team of volunteers some hard lessons, but ultimately it created even more drive. Flynn said he isn’t the type to give up.

“That sums up Thankyou: we jump in head first, we don’t know how to swim and then we start swimming. The start was too good to be true, everything was working for us and then it didn’t, everything went bad,” Flynn said.

“That sums up Thankyou: we jump in head first, we don’t know how to swim and then we start swimming.”

“We do shoot for the big stuff, that isn’t a done deal, that isn’t easy. There always comes a point with everything we do, that goes from scary to ‘woah’. It is challenging but it is exciting too.”

They initially cracked the grassroots cafe market, but it took them three years to get a large retailer onboard. He said they were throwing around statements such as “building a consumer movement” and hashtags and it would illicit smiles from corporations they were pitching to, but not much else.

“We would go to retailers and they would be like it is a nice idea, but it is niche, you are up against brands that are investing $3 to 5 million on launches, with respect, you don’t have what it takes in the fast moving consumer goods industry,” Flynn explained.

No one was listening to them, so they changed the game.

How to use social media to get what you want

In 2008, as Facebook was just starting to be rapidly adopted by Australians,Flynn got an account. It was in this moment he realised “wow, I think this might be the answer to everything.” In some ways, it was true.

Using the power of the people and this growing technology platform, the company kicked off a viral social media campaign with the purpose of getting the Thankyou water product into 7Eleven convenience stores across Australia.

“We took the brand and the concept to the people,” Flynn said. “We launched a video on YouTube, saying we booked a meeting with 7Eleven in Australia in two weeks time and we are asking you to jump onto their Facebook wall and say: ‘7Eleven, if you stock Thankyou Water, I’d buy it.'”

The campaign went what was considered at the time viral. Hundreds of people posted their support for the product on the 7Eleven Facebook page. Within eight days, Thankyou Water was on the shelves of 7Eleven.

“7Eleven was kinda gobsmacked at what happened.It was one of the fastest new product launches they have ever done,” Flynn said.“We had built the brand, room by room, person by person. And they were the people coming to the support of Thankyou.”

This viral component was used to push through a barrier that just seemed to be impossible to push through. It became a main component in their marketing play as they moved forward; whenever they became stuck.

“It is about people power, and the Internet is a medium for that. The people aren’t on the Internet, they use the internet,” Flynn said.

“It helps amplify and create a point of connection. The last video we launched had 500,000 views on Facebook, and that’s amazing, that is the sort of connection and shareability that is very hard to get anywhere else.”

In 2013, when the large supermarkets weren’t interested in their products, they used this viral model again. The team booked in a meeting with Australian’s major supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, in two weeks time. They then told their supporters to prepare the troops via a YouTube video.

During the next few weeks, the Facebook pages of the supermarkets were flooded with thousands of posts and videos urging them to stock the product. “It was edgy, Coles and Woolies don’t like edge like that,” Flynn said. “We didn’t give Coles and Woolies any heads up. We wanted an element of surprise, I think we got it.”

If they didn’t, the helicopter they hired to fly above the supermarkets’ headquarters complete with a message of thanks to the supermarkets for saving the world probably got them over the line. They are now stocked in both supermarkets.

The most recent viral campaign was in the form of a “pay what you want” book, titled Chapter One, a crowdfunding project that launched online in March. The plan was to sell the motivational-style book, which outlines the start of the Thankyou business in one chapter, to anyone who wanted to contribute to the future of Thankyou.

The profits from the book were to fund the next moves by the company: a New Zealand launch and Baby products.The campaign was live streamed and Flynn packed boxes while the audience watched on as the money ticked up. It was another wild success.

To date, the book project has earned A$1,465,095.07, beating its A$1.2 million target substantially. Large companies bought thousands of books for their staff, while individuals contributed whatever they could for a single copy. The power of the people pushed the company forward, yet again.

“If we want to take on a new country or a huge new product venture, we don’t have the capital access. Some would say the model is flawed. What is powerful is the consumer being part of something that 100% exists for the impact,” Flynn said.

“Together, what seems like a little insignificant act, like buying a book, but when you combine it, it actually becomes this unstoppable force.”

At the end of the day, the product is king

In such a competitive market, only relying on the social good element to get across the line is never going to work, Flynn explained. It took him three years to realise this but he now believes the quality of the product is what holds the most importance.

“The story going out is a much a win as the funding. If the product is not good enough, then the whole model is flawed,” Flynn said. “A nice video on YouTube is a great way to start something, but to get it to where it has to go, it has to do more than that.”

If a social good product isn’t of high quality, people will buy a one-off for the feel good factor and then move on. They won’t commit and they won’t come back for seconds.

Flynn said you are selling the cause to the consumer, but the retailers just want to know that the product will sell. He said in the social enterprise space people wanted to believe a good cause can sell, but he has learned the hard way, that isn’t the case.

“I wake up every day because of the cause, but just because I wake up for that, doesn’t mean the retailer is waking up for that. And just because it is inspirational and people love it, it doesn’t often get it over the line. It really has to stack up on many, many levels,” he explained.

At the end of the day, Flynn and his team just wanted to change the game. To prove that the multinationals can’t always beat the power of the masses. It is still early days, but the future is looking pretty good. And thatnaivekid, Daniel? Well, he is saving the world.

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