Many companies and brands come to be seen as staid: being boring is not usually a bad thing, but for a brand that has been exciting in the past, it is not a good place to be. Moving a brand or a business to a different location in people's minds is frequently essential, but requires some effort to overcome the inertia of most people's thinking.
Reviving an established product is really a issue that faces most firms at one time or another. Doing so is really a balancing act in between creating a new concept for the product on the one hand, and the risk of alienating loyal clients on the other.
The Vespa scooter, manufactured by Italian business Piaggio, has been about since 1946. Vespa is really Italian for wasp, a reference to the buzzing noise the scooter makes: it has an iconic status deriving from the 1950s and 1960s, when it was a stylish alternative to the motorcycle.
In more recent years, though, its popularity suffered a decline, so Piaggio made the decision to revive the brand. Piaggio's British PR agency invited British celebrities to design their "dream Vespa," the designs to be created in reality by a vehicle customizing business. Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding designed one with accessories for the modern woman, for instance, while photographer David Bailey created a fur-covered version.
At the same time, a parallel competitors was run for the common public: the winner would have their design displayed at Sotheby's, and could be given their personal customized version of a Vespa ET2 scooter. The winning design was used for publicity purposes by Vespa before being handed more than to the lucky winner, but the celebrity designs were auctioned in aid of the charity Action on Addiction. The business even found a scooter customized by Salvador Dalí in 1962, and borrowed it from the Guggenheim Museum for the campaign.
The campaign as a whole generated a really big quantity of media permutations-it involved celebrities, a public competitors, a charitable element, and even a High Street store element (Vespas had been exhibited in the windows of Top Shop as part of the competitors publicity). Overall, the campaign generated over 60 million opportunities to see, based on print media readership alone.
McVitie's is the leading British biscuit manufacturer, producing a wide range of sweet and savory biscuits. The business has, for some years, run an annual "Dunking Day" as a way of promoting the biscuits via the well-known habit many individuals have of dipping their biscuits into hot tea or coffee (dunking). The intention behind Dunking Day was to encourage tea and coffee drinkers to accompany each cup with a biscuit.
The issue was that Dunking Day had become a pretty run-of-themill event with little news value. Once was humorous, twice was mildly interesting, three times was pretty meaningless: the event was relegated to "special interest day" one-liners.
McVitie's PR consultants realized that they needed a story that Britain (and, as it turned out, the world) would wish to hear. The consultants put forward the idea that McVitie's should commission academic research into the science of dunking, so the company engaged Dr. Len Fisher of Bristol University to investigate the physics of dunking biscuits into hot drinks.
It turned out that dunking releases the flavor of the biscuits. Photos of Dr. Fisher and his team experimenting with the biscuits had been released to TV and the press, along with a scientific report was produced. The outcome was remarkable-the story was picked up internationally, and whatever it did for Dr. Fisher's scientific reputation, it certainly put McVitie's Dunking Day back on the news map.
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1. PR tactics include competitions and press releases
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