Ramone Boyd
Amday Wolde
Tawnya Bell
Case Western Reserve University - Weatherhead School of Management
Chris Laszlo
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World centric is a company committed to providing high-quality, reasonably priced compostable food storage containers as viable alternatives to styrofoam or plastic options. World Centric’s customers and prospects require a compelling business case in order to choose World Centrics products. Many studies suggest that consumers are likely to purchase from a company which shares their values. These customers are more engaged and more often buy from companies who share their values. Because World Centric is a company that works everyday towards their vision of, “a thriving world where everyone’s basic needs are met with a beneficial impact on the environment” they connect to consumers who share this worldview and desire to support companies like World Centric. We developed a financial model to quantify customer wallet share as a function of customer engagement for World Centric’s core products.
Our innovation uses industry data for a base case to analyze a company’s customer engagement. A model was built that utilizes reported current customer engagement to estimate a fully engaged customer base, then translates a fully engaged customer into company revenues. This model shows the direct relationship between customer engagement and profits, and enables customers to connect the financial benefit to the social and environmental benefit of purchasing World Centric compostable products.
World Centric’s customers needed a way to identify additional business benefit of utilizing World Centric’s products. Many of these customers already knew of the positive environmental benefit of utilizing World Centric’s compostable products, but needed a way to measure the financial benefit of engaged customers that connect to World Centric’s mission, vision and values.
This new tool in the hands of World Centric’s sales force will add to their already robust environmental education on the benefits of using fully compostable products sold by World Centric. The intent is to influence food suppliers tendency to buy fully compostable products to store food for customers in cafeterias and restaurants. Overall the idea is that this will lead to reduced use of products life styrofoam and plastics which are not compostable.
This innovation provides a solid way for World Centric to quantify their benefit to other companies beyond providing high quality, reasonably priced compostable products.
We expect an increase in food suppliers use of World Centric’s compostable products because they are now able to quantify what increased engagement with customers who are concerned about the environment means from a business standpoint. This will in turn reduce the utilization of non-compostable and environmentally harmful products like styrofoam. A reduction in the amount of styrofoam and plastic products in landfills will result reduced solid waste and carbon footprint. For World Centric this means that the amount of philanthropic giving and support of grassroots environmental and social organizations can be increased.
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Todd West, Regional Sales Manager - Great Lakes
Janae Lloyd, Organizational Development Manager
World Centric produces compostable cutlery and food containers as an alternative to plastic products. They seek to reduce the carbon footprint of food container production and provide education on sustainability strategies.