Business Campaigning celebrates its 20th anniversary
New branch in Africa
Fortunately, history has now sufficiently proven the value of campaigning and innovation, and the customer base is correspondingly large, Metzinger continued. In 2018, the transformation into a public limited company and the establishment of the first campaigning center in Africa is planned in Johannesburg.
From the non-profit sector
Peter Metzinger had the idea for a model that could be used to systematically plan, implement and evaluate any campaign and change process according to the same pattern and also train campaigners back in 1997, when he was still working for Greenpeace. On November 19, 1997, he began to develop the planning and training system later called the "business campaigning® model" and the first seminar was held on February 12, 1998. A year later, the name "business campaigning" was created to express the fact that campaigning, which originally came from the non-profit sector, can also be used for companies.
Dow Chemicals marketing strategy
The first business campaigning workshop took place in Bergün in 1999. According to Metzinger, 25 Dow Chemicals employees from all over the world used it to develop a global marketing strategy that lasted at least seven years.In the following two decades, the business campaigning model was used to write the Open Forum concept for the WEF in Davos, business plans for start-ups that are still successful today, the corporate communications concept of Swisscom and the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, the strategy of the FDP Zurich in the 2014 election campaign, which brought about a turnaround for the party after more than 20 years of decline, the much-noticed anniversary campaign of the Urner Kantonalbank and much more.In Vietnam, the model was used to train agencies and authorities as part of the Swiss-Vietnamese Clean Air Program. Peter Metzinger spoke about the model in the USA and Africa. Further excerpts from the history of the agency can be found can be downloaded here.
Target group develops campaigns
According to business campaigning GmbH, campaigning is characterized, among other things, by the right target group orientation. In 2004, for example, the company began to have campaigns and concepts developed by the target group itself rather than by its own professionals. The first campaign designed in this way enabled a comparison to be made and a fourfold increase in market share was identified for the product advertised in this way. This resulted in a workshop design called Target Community Lab™, which enables non-professionals to develop campaign strategies.Target Community Labs were used for the marketing of the film "My name is Eugen", for the redesign of the Tamedia job advertisement, the service design of the Transparenta pension fund collective foundation, the national apprenticeship campaign chance06, the internal anchoring of new guiding principles etc., among others.
