If Apple made sausage rolls
If you are vegan in the UK, you can’t have missed the Greggs vegan sausage roll. How did you first hear about it? Were you just passing a Greggs bakery on the high street and see they had it on their menu, or did you see TV host Piers Morgan getting angry about it on Good Morning Britain – one of the UK’s highest-rating breakfast TV shows? How do you think Piers Morgan first heard about it? Do you think he just spotted it on the menu when he popped out to buy lunch? No, of course not. When Greggs launched their vegan sausage roll they ran one of the most creative PR campaigns aimed at journalists the vegan sector has ever seen. Greggs packaged up their new vegan sausage roll in box that looked like it was an Apple iPhone and sent them to journalists. On the side in silver lettering it said: Pastry Layers: 96, Flake Resolution: Optimal, Taste Level: Maximum, Mega Bites: 10. This was accompanied by an online launch video that would have made Apple proud, but instead of featuring an £800 iPhone it featured their £1 new vegan pastry. And of course, these samples were sent to the journalists working on Good Morning Britain who, knowing Piers’ negative opinions of all things vegan, knew they had a good story. Let’s get him to try it live on the show!
For someone who has taken such a public anti-vegan stance, Piers Morgan has probably done more to bring veganism into public consciousness than the majority of vegan campaigners put together. Yes, he ended up spitting the sausage roll into a bin – obviously something he was planning to do, because the bin was already conveniently to hand – but the message was out there. Greggs had just launched a £1 vegan sausage roll at their stores and the vegan world went crazy. It doesn’t matter that Greggs were not the first to make a vegan sausage roll. It doesn’t matter if you think there are better vegan pastries out there. They were the ones who made the nation aware of it in the biggest way. For the next month you were lucky to be able to get your hands on one – you had to get there early in the morning before they ran out. Greggs reported a 58% rise in profits and a surge in customer numbers which they accredited to the publicity its vegan sausage roll helped drive.
None of this was by accident. The media didn’t just say “ooh, look, a vegan sausage roll”. It was carefully planned, well executed and helped by just a little bit of luck. But, then again, we all know that ‘luck’ is just a by-product of hard work.
So how does this apply to you and your company? Well, we now know that your product or service just being vegan isn’t newsworthy any more. Tens of national companies launched vegan sausage rolls in the months after Greggs launched theirs and they barely got a mention in the papers. If they did, it was about them trying to follow Greggs’ success. And the last thing you want is a paper taking your story and changing it so it’s more about your competitor than about you.
Instead, you need to find a real hook to your story: you need to find an idea and angle that makes your story newsworthy beyond being vegan. And the thing that is newsworthy might not be your product, service, or even your company – it might be you. For example, Mummy Meagz have had as much written about their founder than they have about their vegan creme egg. Mummy Meagz is actually Meagan Boyle, a vegan pensioner and activist who launched the business from a local coffee shop with her daughter. Her story is intimately entwined with the company’s. How many vegan pensioners do you know that launch an internationally successful company? It’s a great personal interest story that people want to write about because we’re far more interested in a human success story than a company’s. Again, if you already have a remarkable business and a remarkable story this makes PR so much easier. Was your company launched on the back of a unique personal journey or are you on a mission to change the world? Because if you are then it will be far easier to get publications to feature stories about you and your company.
