Greggs On A Roll
Fast-food chain Greggs is on a roll. A good PR roll. We so often comment on companies and people that get into a mess by failing to use some basic and well-known tenet of PR, that it is nice to instead focus on a company that seems to be sure-footed. While not doing anything amazing, it is just doing PR well.
Good Results – And a Staff Bonus
This month Greggs announced a phenomenal growth in sales which allowed them to award 19,000 employees a £300 bonus at the end of the month. The numbers are even more impressive when you consider that in May 2018, 18 months ago, Greggs issued a profit warning due to subdued sales that knocked 17% off the share price. This year’s bonus and positive results were widely reported, giving heaps of great publicity to the humble high street chain.
The Vegan Sausage Roll
The jump in sales was widely attributed to the success of last January’s launch of the vegan sausage roll. This in itself was another great PR success.
There really is nothing to beat catching the zeitgeist. Veganism has gone from a dusty forgotten cupboard to the limelight as ethical consumers vote with their pennies, not just to protect the welfare of the animals but also to protect the planet. (The link between veganism and climate activism is an interesting one that we may return to later. It is in itself a PR success that may yet fall apart.)
Greggs Social Media – A Case Study for Modern Marketing
But what really turbo-charged sales was the reactive Twitter campaign. Piers Morgan, who has seven million, followers tweeted ‘Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns’. To which @GreggsOfficial responded ‘Oh hello Piers, we’ve been expecting you’.
There were a number of other witty responses to those who took aim at the sausage roll. All of which greatly helped sales.
As noted at the beginning of the blog, the combination of all these things had led to a raft of coverage about how well Greggs is doing. Here are pieces in The Telegraph, The New Statesman (broadly positive), Reuters, The Independent, There are many more. Hats off to the marketing team and particularly the person who decided to allow the Twitter team to step outside standard corporate responses.
Lindsay Williams is based in London but runs training sessions in multiple time zones, including the US, Europe, Africa and Asia, working online or travelling to host small and large scale training events. With 20 years of experience as a communications consultant with corporations and international organisations, Lindsay also runs Personal Impact Training and Pitching Via Zoom courses.
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Interesting case study. Am glad I don’t have to use Twitter – a hair-trigger medium with instant, global reach. Thank heavens people like Trump aren’t allowed anywhere near it. Oh, hang on….
In fairness, there are some who think he and the Iranian foreign minister may have averted war through judicious use of Twitter’s instant, open communication: https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-iran-twitter-war/
Thank you for your comments Robert. Good article from Wired – an angle I had not read elsewhere.