BOTTLE's retail PR consultants recently achieved a fantastic 136 pieces of press coverage as Poundland announced its European expansion plans.
Here, we’ve outlined the campaign and how we achieved this.
OBJECTIVES
Poundland has been planning for a long time to make its move into Europe.
Given its success in Northern Ireland (which included substantial numbers of shoppers travelling from the Republic of Ireland) its natural first move was Ireland. As this was a corporate story and not aimed at consumers, the target was firmly media relations, with the only social media element being journalists who are prominent on Twitter.
As Poundland’s long-standing PR consultancy, BOTTLE has been undertaking highly successful corporate PR for the retailer since 2007 and knew that the announcement would be big news for the retail correspondents and trade in a gloomy high street summer.
IMPLEMENTATION
With her keen interest in changes to Britain’s High Street and her love of the discount sector, Claer Barrett, the FT’s retail correspondent, was a natural first choice for the story and BOTTLE recommended giving her an exclusive, with Poundland’s Irish agency, WHPR, securing an exclusive with The Irish Times to complement it. This strategy was adopted because Jim would have to prioritise Ireland for his broadcast interviews and so the usual targets for corporate announcements (such as The Today Programme, Five Live and BBC Breakfast) would not be possible.
An interview for Claer with Jim McCarthy, Poundland’s CEO, was arranged ahead of 2nd August, with a strict embargo in place. The result was that the business desk prioritised to page one of the business section.
The exclusive lead to citywires covering the story first thing on 2nd August, as well as teasers coming from newspaper reviews on Newsnight the night before and on many of that morning’s broadcast shows. Once the release was issued, interviews with trade publications and business or retail correspondents were quickly organised for that morning.
RESULTS
The result was blanket coverage in the national print and broadcast media, tabloids, trade press and a significant spread of regional coverage through newswires, with 136 pieces in total so far. Twitter erupted with the news, including tweets by influential journalists such as The Today Programme’s Evan Davies.