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Putting the Relationship Back in Public Relations

Public Relations doesn’t mean your only focus is spreading the word about your product or brand. It is also important to keep your audience engaged and involved. Creating content that encourages your audience to be involved not only helps your audience to feel engaged with your brand, but it also offers an opportunity for new and exciting ideas!

A great example of creating a strong relationship by using an engaging PR strategy is the Lays “Do Us a Flavor” campaign. This campaign is used to determine what the next new flavor of Lays potato chips will be. Customers are engaged in two different ways through this campaign:

1. The new flavors of Lays are created by Lays customers. This year’s contest’s flavors are Wasabi Ginger, Cheddar Bacon Mac & Cheese, Cappuccino, and Mango Salsa.
2. Customers are engaged through the decision process by casting their votes on the potato chip flavor, they want to win.

Last week, the Marketing Works team held our own in office #DoUsAFlavor contest to decide which new flavor of Lays potato chips was our favorite. We started thinking about how this is an excellent PR strategy to keep customers involved in the brand. Here are three parts of the strategy we noticed were successful:

• Presenting an opportunity for fresh ideas.  Instead of creating a new potato chip flavor and simply putting it on the market, Lays is presenting an opportunity for their customers to have a say in the company’s decisions. Each year there are new flavors for the campaign, which encourages customers to create new flavors drawing from their own inspiration.

•  Encouraging customers to be involved in your brand. By using the hashtags #DoUsAFlavor and #DUAF, the customers that participate in tasting and deciding on their favorite flavors are encouraged to use the hashtags to share their opinions and pictures via social media. Not only does this encourage interaction with the brand but it also increases the reach of the contest by having customers share it with all of their followers as well.

• Increase in sales.  Another extremely successful aspect of this campaign is that in order to try all the flavors, customers are encouraged to buy four bags of chips. While maintaining the customer relationship in wanting to hear their feedback, it is also directly driving sales. As customers post on Facebook and tweet about their favorite flavors, the customers are essentially recommending their favorite flavor to their friends and followers and encouraging them to try it as well.

Have you also participated in the #DoUsAFlavor campaign? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Mworks740 • August 5, 2014

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