Sophie Capron, communications director at Aduna, explains why the business should win the marketing and PR category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition.
Aduna is an Africa-inspired health and beauty brand and social business. Our mission is to create demand for under-utilised natural products from small producers in Africa – starting with the extraordinary superfood baobab fruit.
When we started out in 2012, 95% of people had never heard of baobab. We had to use all our creativity and marketing skills to create a market for baobab from scratch – and on an absolute shoestring.
We spent months creating the perfect premium Africa-inspired branding. We’ve stalked celebrities, enrolled the press, done Ted Talks, convinced buyers, and spent thousands of hours educating consumers at events, via social media, and in-store sampling.
The hard work has paid off. We’ve successfully taken baobab from obscurity to best-selling superfood in retailers like WholeFoods, Planet Organic and Liberty, creating a global health food trend, and enabling us to provide sustainable income to 2,000 women and their families in Ghana’s poverty-stricken Upper East Region.
Our baobab sales have skyrocketed 683% in the last two years. We have now rolled out nationwide in Holland & Barrett and are stocked in 1,000 stores in 15 overseas markets with the US, Canada and Australia to follow soon.
This summer, we harnessed the power of the #baobablove around the world to secure 13,000 public votes in Virgin’s “Pitch to Rich” contest, finishing as runner-up and winning £100,000 towards our ‘Make Baobab Famous’ campaign. This will help us turbo-charge awareness of baobab, enabling us to create income for many more thousands of families in Africa.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the top three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
