SUMMER 2023

WELCOME AND THANKS FOR JOINING!

YOUR MARKETING JOURNEY STARTS HERE

Hello Katrina,

Thanks for joining us on what is the beginning of our journey here with the inaugural edition of the R2 Marketing Minute! This quarterly(ish) newsletter is designed to give those tasked with marketing and sales for your organization a little boost for how you think about and market your R2 Certification as a differentiator and a value-add for current and prospective clients. 

We plan to give you a little behind-the-scenes look at how we’re talking to your customers, what we’re learning from them, and where our messaging is headed, so you can reinforce and amplify those same messages. We’ll also let you know what we’ve added to the Resource Center, and we hope you’ll let us know if you have any questions that we can answer or if you have any ideas for us to consider. And, speaking of the Resource Center, we hope you’ll take a look over there as well. We’ve relaunched it with some more good tools that we think you’ll find useful in your marketing efforts. Our plan is to slowly but continuously add more resources there, and again, drop us a line from time to time in our marketing inbox and let us know how we’re doing.

IT'S TIME TO ReTHINK ELECTRONICS

For this first edition, we wanted to explore a theme you may have read from us, and that’s the idea of “ReThink Electronics.” It pops up in much of what we’ve been writing the past six months, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. That’s because it’s become one of our foundational points when we’re talking to customers, both consumers and B2B alike. 

What it boils down to is this – We all love electronics, but what we’re doing today isn’t sustainable and is working against the big push for a circular economy. By definition, electronics sustainability means we’d enjoy all the benefits that electronics bring today without sacrificing the present or the future – and we aren’t there yet. So, everyone who makes, uses, processes, and makes policy around electronics needs to ReThink our relationship with our devices within our roles and make better decisions. More responsible and sustainable decisions. It can’t always be about the traditional bottom line, hyper-focused on maximizing profit (or, in some cases, minimizing losses). We must find the balance between people, the planet, and, yes, profit. Now, what does this mean from a marketing messaging standpoint? Well, like I said, ReThink is pretty foundational and sets up a lot of other messaging.

For example, there’s another theme that we’ll dig into deeper next time called “Sustainable X," and it builds from ReThink.

Sustainable X (sub for “X” as “ITAD,” “Mobile,” “Returns,” “Recycling...”) looks at your customers’ job to be done through the lens of shifting them from a profit-dominated mindset to a 3P mindset, injecting people and the planet into the equation. 

If we can just start there – getting customers to ReThink their goals – then we believe different decisions will come. For example, ITAD folks have gotten really attached to their remarketing dollars, but we all know that some of the stuff you get actually has negative value. In some cases, ITAD is going to cost money, not produce a positive return. If an ITAM, or the CIO/CTO, or Procurement person is focused on profit, your facility is stuck playing a pricing game. If they understand that they need to balance people and the planet along with profits, they'll make better decisions, and your facility gets to play a value game. This changes the proposition because your R2 Certification absolutely adds value for customers. 

From a marketing perspective, we're asking your customers to ReThink IATD, Mobile, Returns, or Recycling to shift to a more sustainable version of that function - and choosing an R2 Certified partner is a big part of the solution.

And that's a wrap of the first edition of the R2 Marketing Minute. These are the kinds of conversations we’ll have in these newsletters, and we hope you’ll find them valuable. We'd love to hear how the conversations have been going with your customers. Where are they on their journey to electronics sustainability? What's driving their decisions? How aware are they of R2 and what your Certification means for their business? The more we know, the more we can help! 

PS – since there won’t be another Marketing Minute Newsletter before the E-Reuse/E-Scrap Conference, we wanted to invite you to our preconference workshop about marketing your R2 Certification that will be Monday, September 18, from 1:15-2:45 at the conference site in New Orleans. We hope to see you there! 

Jeff Seibert 

Chief Provocateur