Boldly going where no Cheddar had gone before, at 04.30hrs on Tuesday 28 July 2009 West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers (WCFC) in the UK launched a 300g wedge of handmade-on-the-farm extra mature Cheddar into the upper atmosphere above Clench Common in Wiltshire.
Why did they do this?
To be the first cheese wedge into space; to raise the profile for the WCFC brand, and to create opportunities to talk about its unique benefits. For 36 hours, 12 dairy farmers in the southwest orbited the airwaves, generating a level of empathy for their product that can’t be bought with BOGOF (buy one get one free) promotions.
While West Country Farmhouse Cheddars are of the highest quality and command a premium, the volume of production is small in comparison with the main contenders in the market. The West Country group can’t compete with high advertising spends and price promotions, so are brave enough to invest the little resource they have into more creative marketing, achieving differentiation through imagination and earning column inches and plenty of airtime.
Trust in your public relations agency’s creativity and strategic common sense is imperitive. Reticent at first, these days the West Country group has more confidence in ‘off the wall’ tactics since the success of the ‘cows with accents’ story, cheddarvision.tv, cheddarometer.com and the formula for the perfect cheese sandwich.
These public relations stunts have proved that the British media and their audience are happy to be sold to as long as they’re entertained at the same time. If you’re prepared to take yourselves less seriously than your product, and are prepared to go all-out to make sure the stunt has real ‘talkability’, then you’ll find yourselves with plenty of chances to fly the flag.
We let all the local and regional radio stations know what we were attempting, invited local TV to come and film the launch and issued a release to national, regional and online news desks. With BBC Points West watching and having completed national radio interviews with Heart and Magic FM, the pressure was well and truly on. But whatever the outcome of the project, we knew people would be interested in the endeavour – it had all the key ingredients: topicality, eccentricity, originality and jeopardy.
From the outset, we made sure we were available for live interviews and managed to maintain the momentum of the story by making the most of the progress of the Cheddar as it was launched, lost and finally found.
The launch went smoothly – more nationwide local BBC radio interviews ensued, but what of the Cheddar? Its specially designed pod contained a GPS tracking device that failed to send back any messages to us on terra firma. So we issued a news release calling for the public to help us find the cheese lost in space.
What happened next was interstellar. BBC Breakfast News, The Daily Mail, The Times, the BBC Online homepage, Western Daily Press, BBC Radio stations including Cambridge, Swindon, Wiltshire, Somerset, Northampton, Newcastle, and Star FM, Midwest FM and Bristol Community Radio all ran the story all day on the Tuesday, using live interviews throughout and engaging their listeners with phone-ins, quizzes and an appeal to keep eyes skyward.
The cheese eventually turned up in a back garden in High Wycombe the following morning and the local police station contacted West Country with much amusement. We sent out another release detailing the return of the cheese and even more coverage ensued.
The Cheddar’s odyssey achieved more than 60 pieces of online coverage; several local Buckinghamshire and West Country press pieces (including a page in the Western Daily Press); national press articles including pieces in The Sun, The Times and The Daily Mail; television coverage including rolling bulletins on BBC Breakfast News, BBC News 24 and seven bulletin spots on BBC Points West and BBC East; plus 33 interviews on local BBC radio stations the length and breadth of the country, resulting in more than 100 broadcast slots. We recorded 165 tweets on the day of the launch and inspired one BBC DJ to run the story on his Facebook site.
Total airtime for West Country Farmhouse Cheddar exceeded four hours and the total OTS (opportunities to see, hear or read) is estimated at 300-400 million. That’s a lot of close encounters … of the curd kind.
Dom Lane is associate director at the Bristol branch of Bray Leino, a public relations company with offices throughout the UK.
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