How we helped our client achieve national recognition
THE BRIEF
The beverage company, Jimmy’s Iced Coffee, came to Sunny Bird PR with one overarching goal; to be stocked in every fridge around the globe. The fun-loving brand had made the jump from start-up to SME and was looking for a PR agency to help boost its national profile and appeal to a broader audience in order to secure new stockists.
THE CHALLENGE
Being home to some of the world’s largest and most well-known brands, the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector is a notoriously hard space for smaller brands to break into. This meant the Sunny Bird PR team faced some serious competition for product space and press coverage. An additional challenge presented itself in changing the perception of the iced coffee itself by consumers and journalists and persuading them that an iced coffee was not just for summer, but great all year round.
THE SOLUTION
The first thing we did was position the brand’s focus away from its bike-riding, beach-loving founder Jim, to appeal to a wider consumer audience as well as tailoring the PR to meet the specific requirements of the brand’s biggest supermarket stockists. To do this, we highlighted the taste and the quality of the coffee itself. We spent time introducing the products to key journalists across the food and drink media, highlighting the USP of just four ingredients; Arabica coffee, British milk, water and sugar. And we utilised the four different flavours; Original, Skinny, Mocha and Dairy Free, to create tailored pitched to individual journalists or publications.
We capitalised on the many brand developments and our strong relationships with journalists in the food and drink trade titles to ensure a steady flow of press coverage year-round. Whether it was the move to Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee, a packaging re-design, new stockists or the introduction of bio-caps, we always had an interesting piece of news for the trade press.
In the consumer facing media, we wanted to secure more column inches than a simple product shot demanded, which meant focusing on the story and the ethos behind brand. We profiled the co-founders and siblings Jim and Suzie Cregan. We carefully curated profiles for each of them, discovering their individual areas of expertise, which ranged from marketing wizardry to a passion for sustainable packaging, understanding their differences led us to understand which business and features writers would be best to pitch them to. This activity resulted in long-form features in The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Forbes magazine and the front-page on The Grocer to name just a few. We also secured multiple speaker opportunities and podcast opportunities off the back of this including the popular We Work and The Food Talk Show.
Away from traditional media coverage, the team sought to increase brand awareness of Jimmy’s Iced Coffee among their target audience and influential journalists, decision makers and buyers. We worked with event organisers to ensure these people would be seeing and drinking Jimmy’s Iced Coffee at key events year-round. This included supplying cartons to thirsty cast members of Made in Chelsea, journalists at the GQ Editor’s Lunch, performers at the Capital FM ball, Sainsbury’s shoppers at a Reader’s Event and the take-home goody bags at the Society of British Editor’s Magazine Awards.
THE OUTCOME
Over 18 months we achieved 100 pieces of media coverage for the iced coffee company in a variety of titles from trade and regional press to consumer publications such as The Daily Telegraph, MailOnline, Yahoo!, Good Housekeeping, Great British Food and Vegetarian Living.
This reached more than 20 million people which, if the same space was bought in adverting would have cost over £700,000!