Office equipment manufacturer Brother exceeded its sales target after a successful PR campaign
Brother is a leading technology specialist providing print, scan, labelling and communications solutions for businesses of all sizes. Offering a range of tools to facilitate working in the office and on-the-go, Brother also provides the expertise to help businesses in their search for improved efficiency and productivity, working closely with its customers to establish long-term business partnerships.
The challenge
Brother UK’s public relations agency, Citypress was tasked with raising awareness and driving sales of label printers among office professionals, namely office managers and administrators across the UK.
The campaign also needed to support Brother’s ‘Unclutter your mind’ advertising creative, while at the same time ensuring the product’s tangible benefits were communicated to Brother’s target audience.
Solution and strategy
To get under the skin of office professionals, Citypress undertook the mammoth task of reviewing and analysing hundreds of job specs for office managers, as well as completing qualitative interviews with office professionals. This revealed that the ability to stay organised is not only an essential part of the office professionals’ job role, but also enables them to be generally happier and calmer at work. Essentially, a tidy office really does make a tidy mind.
Using this insight, Citypress’ strategy was to help bridge the gap between label printers and the feeling of ‘happiness’ associated with a tidy office. To do this, it needed to not only clearly articulate the tangible benefits of using a label printer (label your work and instantly become more organised/tidy) but also the emotional benefits – essentially, the feeling of being able to leave the office relaxed and knowing you’re on top of everything.
Office professionals are not a typical B2B audience; their media consumption is primarily that of a consumer. This posed a significant challenge: how to communicate a business benefit through consumer media channels?
Citypress set out on a mission to appeal to office workers both in their capacity as professionals, and as consumers. To do this, a two-pronged marketing strategy was used. It saw the company firstly ignite a national conversation about the benefits of labelling; and secondly directly engage with office professionals using experiential, emarketing, social media, and online gaming platforms.
Following widespread media coverage on TV and beyond, Brother’s Facebook and Twitter platforms were used to activate the conversation online. As well as delivering original content to the growing number of fans and followers, Citypress and Brother also launched a competition to win a luxury holiday to help office professionals escape from the stress of the office. Creative content included a video interview with Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University, on the issue of messy desks. The social media activity was supported with a targeted Facebook advertising strategy.
In addition, Brother exhibited at the Office Show, which sees more than 4000 office professionals, over the course of two days, meet suppliers and discuss key issues. To achieve stand-out at the event and attract a high volume of visitors (and, therefore, data capture), Citypress developed a messy desk themed interactive digital game. After playing the game, participants were asked to enter their details into a Brother labelling machine so that they could be added to the leader board. This meant people used the machines, which led to questions about purchasing.
In addition, a partnership with leading office media title, Desk Demon, was arranged. Website content, newsletter inserts, advertorials and an email to reach their subscribers were all produced. Citypress also developed HTML email marketing campaigns to promote Brother’s label printers to the targeted database of office professionals – ensuring Brother capitalised on the increased brand and product awareness.
Results
As a result of the campaign, sales of Brother office labellers exceeded target by 55 per cent. Citypress also secured widespread editorial coverage across national media, including a sofa debate and brand visibility on Sky News, Mail Online, The Daily Telegraph, Yahoo News and the Daily Mail, as well as across the Sky Radio Network, reaching an audience of 169,798,951 in total.
To date, the game has been played more than 37,000 times by more than 19,000 users.
Almost 4000 new Facebook ‘Likes’ were achieved and an audience of 1,357,400 was reached with social media activity throughout the campaign. A new email marketing strategy has also been developed as a result of the quality data of over 2000 office professionals at the Office Show captured during the campaign, which has continued to deliver high open and click-through rates from an additional 1242 office professionals.
