CHALLENGE
Emma Mattress challenged Fieldworks to deliver a 6-month PR campaign to support its UK launch. We successfully raised the company profile in a crowded market, securing two UK retailer partnerships to support its sales objectives in the market.
Brief and objectives
Already known in Europe as a best-selling bed-in-a-box brand, Emma Mattress wanted to launch itself in the UK. As well as selling direct to consumer (D2C) via its own ecommerce channel, Emma Mattress wanted to secure partnerships with UK retailers to stock its mattress range, broadening its sales channels for UK shoppers.
The campaign objectives were to:
• Generate brand awareness for Emma Mattress within the UK media among retail audiences
• Profile co-founders Max Laarmann and Benjamin Quiroga-Rivera in the media
• Differentiate Emma Mattress in the crowded bed-in-a-box market
• Drive web traffic from media owned websites to Emma Mattress’s website to support SEO efforts
• Secure a UK retail partner / stockist for Emma Mattress
STRATEGY
Planning and execution
Following an in-depth messaging workshop, drilling down into Emma Mattress’ business and product pillars, Fieldworks leveraged its persona-based tracking tool and access to its Retail Connections community of 12k+ European senior retailers.
With targeted audiences spanning two types of business persona, Fieldworks suggested a two-pronged strategy for Emma Mattress to assist its conversations with prospective UK retail partners. This spanned B2B and trade media outreach to target senior level c-suite decision makers – from trading and commercial directors to operations heads and board level job titles. It also comprised B2C titles to reach retail buying and merchandising audiences, for broader awareness of the brand within the market.
Strategy, tactics, creativity and innovation
To position Emma Mattress as a challenger brand and differentiate it from the competition, Fieldworks devised a newsjacking strategy to deliver key messages around the company’s sustainable business model – comprising low levels of funding and investment on product quality and R&D – into the media.
In recognition that retail buyers and buying teams at UK retailers look out to the wider media and industry when selecting stockist partners to work with, in addition to senior level c-suite audiences via trade and B2B PR, Fieldworks also recommended a complementary B2C PR effort to ensure visibility for the bed-in-a-box brand in the wider media.
This focused on product reviews and product placement. It also promoted Emma Mattress’s seasonal discount codes around Black Friday and Boxing Day, its key sales periods. This allowed PR to support the D2C sales activity, which in turn buoyed the D2C sales figures used in the B2B PR activation.
RESULTS
We set out to drive brand awareness by generating coverage in target media channels. At the close of the campaign we had achieved 161 pieces of coverage including BBC Business, Independent, Evening Standard, Retail Week, Charged Retail, Retail Gazette, Direct Commerce, Retail Tech Innovation Hub, Furniture News, Cabinet Maker.
We also generated a huge amount of B2C coverage for Emma Mattress: Independent, Daily Mirror, YOU, Daily Mail, T3, Wired, Woman & Home, Look, woman, House Beautiful, Good Housekeeping, Now, OK. The total ‘opportunities to see’ hit 106.9m globally.
The company co-founders Max Laarmann and Benjamin Quiroga-Rivera caught the interest of the media, thanks to our orchestrated PR and outreach campaign. We secured speaking slots for them at several industry conferences, and ensured they were profiled in key publications of the trade press.
Web referrals to the Emma Mattress website reached 14,816 – generated by our PR coverage. And most importantly, off the back of the Emma Mattress launch campaign, partnership deals were secured with major furniture retailers, DFS and Carpertright, while D2C sales via its ecommerce channel was boosted directly from PR.
