Good PR

Greggs again
No doubt about who is leading the way in terms of Good PR this week. Step forward Greggs and its Gregory and Gregory campaign by the ever-awesome Taylor Herring. This will be an award winner! At the time of writing, nearly 3 million people have viewed the video where Greggs rebranded as Gregory and Gregory. Greggs headed on down to a poncy-sounding artisan food festival with its normal range of food and once the food-snoots had raved about the quality of the morsals they were tasting, it was revealed to them that it was actually from Greggs. 

This kind of cross-platform campaign appeared everywhere and was flooding my own social media streams time and time again. It picked up media hits left right and centre, but the pinnacle has to be the page-three lead story in the Metro. I know the impact that a page-three lead in this paper has and this coverage alone makes it all worthwhile. 

As a footnote to all those financial-director types who say PR is not measurable; the day after the campaign, myself and two trusty Yetis were off on a client day trip and we bought food from Greggs at the service station, just because we had been talking about the story. PR works people, you heard it here first! 

KPMG royal winner
The Royal Wedding is the PR gift that keeps on giving and this time the Good PR gong gets handed to the most unlikely of sources (given auditors usually get a tough time of it), KPMG. Along with the British Retail Consortium, KPMG released figures that showed that consumer spending was up, and the KPMG quote referenced the Royal Wedding as a potential cause of this. 

The quote has been used far and wide and once again demonstrates that if you can sprinkle some HarMeg glitter on any story, the coverage will follow. 

Bad PR

Lush loses
Onto the bad PR side of things and I am afraid that if Greggs was the obvious winner for Good PR, then Lush is the same for Bad PR of the week. 

In a move that I am still not really sure had a who, what, why, where and when, the retail units went from being best known for over-powering smells to campaigning for under-cover police officers to stop lying about their identities to infiltrate groups and communities being investigated. 

Now, I feel I should caveat the last sentence by saying I don’t really understand the campaign nor the cause, and this is quite lazy of me I know, but I just don’t care enough to try and get it. But you lucky PRmoment readers can enjoy much more information about this in a PRresearch feature that will appear on these pages on Tuesday (12 June), so watch this space!

This feels very much like someone senior at Lush has been personally affected by the campaign and is striking out, or maybe the marketing team’s notes were tampered with at an away-day and everyone just went along with it. Credit where credit is due, Lush’s PR team has tried to get ahead of the story by putting information about the campaign on its website (I still didn’t get why it was doing it, and yes, I did read it) and also putting out proactive stories to the likes of Sky News about how its staff were being abused because of the campaign. 

I think its smartest move would have been to kill the campaign as soon as the backlash began and move on. The negativity is going to float around the internets whenever a consumer types in its name and this is never an ideal situation. 

John McAfee
The final bit of Bad PR hasn’t happened yet, but gazing into my crystal balls, I foresee that John McAfee offa internet security/wanted alleged criminal/political wannabe fame is going to be back in the global headlines very soon. He has declared his intention to run for the US Presidency (again) in 2020. In a move that feels very S Club 7, he has said that If he can’t get in with his party of choice (The Libertarian Party) he is going to form his own goddamn party.

If you thought Big Don’s campaign was interesting, this is no-doubt going to be even better.

As ever, berate or congratulate on Twitter. I love you all (even you).

Written by Andy Barr, head of agency 10 Yetis

Seen any good or bad PR lately? You know what to do @10Yetis on Twitter or andy@10Yetis.co.uk on email