Two years ago Dutchman Martijn Arets quit his job as a marketing manager, packed his luggage into an old Volkswagen t-2 bus and went on the quest of interviewing 20 European well-known brand owners.
For five months he traveled to several brand headquarters, from one country to another, to find the answers to these questions:
- What philosophy had the founder of a brand?
- What factors contributed to the brand’s success?
- What went well?
- What not?
- What makes a brand sustainable?
He interviewed CEO’s, founders and brand executives and as a result of this journey, the Dutch edition of his book called “Brand Expedition” was published. In this book Martijn shares what he learned from Europe’s most inspiring brands such as LEGO, Adidas, Mini, Skype, TomTom, Innocent, Netlog, and many more.
Although his expedition and his book were well received and covered in the Dutch media and social media, he felt that having a book only in the Dutch language was limiting its potential. Therefore he decided to translate it and publish it in English as well.
I talked with Martijn about his unusual way of financing and promoting the English edition of his book.
Martijns thinks that the publishing industry is sleeping and has to change, this is why he believes that he can make a world success of this book without help of a publisher. He decided to publish the English version himself. For financing the English version of his book, he launched a crowd funding campaign via Symbid, where he sold 20% of his shares in the English book.
“Benefits of crowd-funding are huge. Most important is the fact that shareholders become immediate ambassadors of your project, because they share in the profits. They’re very motivated to activate their own network”, says Arets. “In order to sustain the shareholders’ interest in the long run, they automatically get a share of 10% in any of the following translations. Currently a Chinese translation is being considered”.
Collecting 20.000 euro took him 2 months and now the English version is scheduled to be published around the middle of March 2012.
He plans to promote his book mostly via Twitter, YouTube and of course Facebook. Arets believes his book will be very interesting for the fans and followers of the brands he reviews. This is a group of over 65 million Facebook fans.
Facebook technology helps interact with people all over the world. There are no geographical boundaries or limitations. Fans of the brands are my target groups, says Martijn. If I can reach just 5% of 65 million fans, my book will be well-known.
The story of the Brand Expedition, and its founder, are already inspiring. Martijn was not afraid to try a new form of financing via Symbid, a crowd-funding website that enables entrepreneurs to secure funding from €20,000 up to €2.5 million. And the promotion of his book is based just on social media. He in fact changed his profession from marketing manager to inspiring author and speaker.
I’m really looking forward to see what he is up to next.