Pure Blonde has thanked fans with a personalised video message created by The Conscience Organisation with public relations managed by Liquid Ideas.

Digital movie

Once you ‘Like’ Pure Blonde on Facebook and click an app to ‘go to your pure place', a digital movie plays.  A scantily clad utopian takes your hand and leads you through the forest, complete with frolicking puppies, waterfalls and lush ferns. As you arrive at the pure place, a neon sign with your name welcomes you and a note with your image (profile picture) lies on the table.

100,000 fans

“Pure Blonde now has 100,000 fans so we wanted to do something to bring that to life. So we created a personalised message for all of our fans letting them know that we've now reached that landmark,” says Clive Coleman, Group Marketing Manager at Carlton & United Breweries.

Music

Pure Blonde included information about music festivals on the Facebook site and also promoted the site at activations at festivals.  “Also on Facebook itself, we did quite a bit of banner advertising to recruit people. Word of mouth was also a big thing – having a really entertaining and engaging site where we gave constant updates, where we gave links to music festivals and opporunities to win tickets,” says Coleman.

Engaging

“We constantly made responses when people had a question or when they commented on our new packaging. We were constantly getting back to them,” says Coleman. Agency The Conscience Organisation takes care of community management for Pure Blonde.

Social Media

Coleman sees Social Media as critical for Pure Blonde. “It allows us to have a two-way communication with our target and what's so beneficial for us is we can get immediate feedback. So if we have new packaging or new advertising going out to market we can get real consumer feedback immediately, which is a huge advantage because normally you have to go into traditional research and it takes quite a while to actually know what's going on out there for the consumers. Through Facebook we get immediate feedback and then we can go back and talk to them and kind of dig down as to what's happening and why.”

Consumer influence

Coleman takes consumer feedback seriously. “Obviously if it's one person we have to put it in perspective, but often it's a clue as to whether something's going right or wrong, which we can then jump into and test in a more robust way.  It can have huge influence. It can change our advertising, our packaging. The power is enormous.

“I think it's the way of the future – people coming together in communities having that sense of belonging that comes from that. Being able to personalise message; have two-way conversations. I would sense this trend that we have towards social media will get stronger and stronger.”

Marketing, PR or Customer Service?

When asked if Coleman sees the Facebook activity as a public relations, marketing or customer service function he says, “It doesn't neatly fit into one… if it's one, I guess it's PR really, which would be quite different to a lot of people, but I just see it as managing a public community.  That's why we use Liquid Ideas, we work really closely with them on their website and digital strategy, it's not a digital technical expert, it's both PR and the digital team coming together.”

What next?

Coleman sees building the community as a priority, “but ultimately it's about building that engagement, that brand love, so we monitor that on an ongoing basis. It's that emotional connection that comes from the two-way engagement that is our ultimate objective.”