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Brief
The Kleenex PR calendar is, apart from specific projects or variant launches, driven by two key seasons – cold and flu and hayfever. One of the Kleenex key strategic drivers are ‘to be big when the season is big’ but previously Kleenex had not invested significant PR budgets in hay fever, instead focusing on the cold and flu season.
Since Kleenex tissues are not a remedy for hayfever, achieving cut through and being seen as a credible commentator can be difficult for the brand. Hay fever is a crowded PR marketplace.
Insight shows that 65% of hayfever sufferers who buy remedies do not buy tissues
Kleenex had a yearly objective of growing pocket pack sales by 10%
The hayfever campaign will be also the first campaign when digital PR will be progressed in conjunction of analogue PR.
Strategy/Execution
The strategy was two-fold. Firstly, Mandate (one of the Engine Group’s PR companies) enlisted the support of hay fever expert Professor Jean Emberlin, Director of the National Pollen and Aerobiology Research Unit, providing medical and professional credence to each of our story angles.
We drew on her knowledge and past research as well used existed material to help us identify questions for the research as well as to help answer questions from questions from both offline/online journalists as well as direct to consumers.
Together we created an in-depth, authoritative report, the Hayfever Health Report, which was based on attitudinal research from a number of audiences.
Several media angles were devised from the research, targeted at different media and at different times, in order to have greater appeal and more longevity, given the length of the season. Both the Report and the accompanying press releases were sent to all key media – print, broadcast and online. A video feature highlighting the Report’s findings was also recorded and featured on several websites, including Mirror.co.uk and MSN.
The UK’s first real-time, interactive hayfever map was created which was powered by Twitter. Twitter is possibly the most talked about website of 2009 and as such is perfect for campaigns designed to generate maximum PR boost from relatively small investment.
We used Twitter to track the spread of hayfever by encouraging people to ‘tweet’ the #hashtag ‘#atishoo’.
Hayfever sufferers were encouraged to make updates about the strength of their symptoms and the location at which they are suffering. This is done by tweeting the first part of their postcode by adding their tag ‘#atishoo’ to the tweet e.g. #atishoo W1W 5. This was then updated into a simple trend line that could actually be built into a geographical map using Google maps. We then tracked and trended this to provide interesting visual data on hayfever hot spots, and a story about how Kleenex is utilising Twitter.
Sufferers also received hints and tips from Professor Emberlin on how to cope over the hayfever season and daily updates on pollen counts across the UK.
Results
All in all, the coverage reached 75 million people, including approximately 15,000 Twitter users, and the overall return on investment was 15:1, far higher than the target of 5:1. Kleenex was seen as a credible commentator on hayfever and the objective of highlighting tissues as a must have item was also successfully achieved.
One user left a comment on The Evening Standard website saying “the BBC no longer has good coverage of pollen so you'd be filling a gap. I'd recommend your feed to everyone”.
Using Twitter to generate PR was a Kleenex ‘first’ and, alongside the Hayfever Health Report, the model is now being shown to Kleenex teams around the world.
Result stats
• 1486 following, 283 followers and 134 updates and 36 direct messages to hayfever sufferers on Twitter
• Google results for ‘hay fever map’
- 1st rank -news article from Mad
- 3rd rank - Kleenex.co.uk
• 120 pieces of coverage
- Exclusive with Evening Standard
• ROI 15:1
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