Member Article

The bgroup makes its mark by going bananas

A Newcastle-based creative agency is literally going bananas after winning first prize in a national competition designed to encourage an enterprising culture.

The bgroup – a growing agency that specialises in connecting with hard to reach audiences such as the youth and enterprise markets – is celebrating after beating off competiton from the UK’s most inventive businesses to scoop the top prize in the National Make Your Mark Enterprise Challenge competition.

Responding to the brief ‘Make life fun…and earn a ton!’, their ‘Is that a banana in your pocket….?’ concept centred around a grocers’ shop selling only rude, mis-shapen and unusual looking fruit and veg, with a social aspect in its profits going to benefit disadvantaged communities.

The bgroup campaigns executive, Danielle Sawyer said: “The witty business concept works as it also raises a genuine, more serious issue around supply and demand. What does actually happen to the fruit and veg that doesn’t make it to the supermarket? By bringing it back into the community it promotes the healthy eating message in a sustainable, cost-efficient way.”

Over 130 employee teams from some of the UK’s most recognised companies took part in the Challenge with a brief to ‘Make life fun…and earn a ton!’ However, it was The bgroup that wowed judges at the Make Your Mark Challenge final that took place in London between 11th and 12th December.

The gruelling schedule involved a full day of workshops and then a two-minute ‘Dragon’s Den’ style pitch to a judging panel, which included the CEOs of Enterprise Insight and Freeserve.

The bgroup copywriter Milly Shaw said: “The idea came from a team brainstorm and we all thought it was important that, although the brief was about having fun and being enterprising, our business idea should also have a social conscience.”

Campaigns assistant Ruth Currie continued: “We identified that the ‘Is that a banana in your pocket….?’ concept would work on a variety of levels, especially in terms of education with the current agenda of healthy eating in schools. The idea was to extend the project into workshops where pupils could learn about the process of growing fruit and veg and how it actually gets to the shop floor.”

The bgroup managing director Siobhan Bales commented: “We are utterly thrilled to be declared the most enterprising business in the country. We do a lot of work within the enterprise market, and so we really understand why enterprise is so vital - for the economy as a whole and for individual organisations and the people who work in them.

“Everyone who works at The bgroup fully embraces the positive ‘can do’ attitude that being enterprising is all about, and winning this award simply proves that we are totally committed to ‘talking the talk’ and ‘walking the walk’ on enterprise issues at every level.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .