🔍 The Recipe For A Successful PR Stunt (Patagonia, Dollar Shave Club)

Good Morning. 

In the past week or so, there have been waves of layoffs. It’s not just engineers that were let go, marketers too. From the impacted people I know, most were not let go for lack of talent.

If you are still hiring, other than Twitter & LinkedIn, layoffs. FYI (https://layoffs.fyi/) also has lists of impacted employees you can reach out to.

If you are in a start-up trying to survive or thrive, I hope our case studies can help boost your performance during this tough time. 

Today’s case study shows how brands can use mission-driven PR stunts to achieve rocket growth in awareness.

Let’s say you have an email list with 100,000 people on it, your current open rate is 25%, and your click-through rate is 2%.

That means you can always count on 25,000 people opening the email and 500 people clicking a link.

Let’s say you’re directing those 500 people to your landing page, which has a 3% conversion rate for your product that costs $250.

So, now you know every time you send an email, you know you’ll do $3750 in sales.

Now, imagine if you used a specific strategy to double your open rate to 50%, and now 50,000 people open your email.

Without your click-through rate or conversion rate changing, you just doubled your email revenue by improving your open rate.

This strategy is exactly what Inbox Mailers will walk you through in its guide.

And even how clients have tripled their email open rates, improved email deliverability, and re-engaged dead email lists.

You can snag the guide here.

Equinox’s “We Don’t Speak January” campaign must have crossed your news feed in the past few weeks. The luxury fitness company decided to ban signing New Year’s resolution members as part of the campaign initiative, to “sub-short-term resolutions”.

The campaign sparked controversy. Many called the campaign bizarre, tone-deaf, and exclusionary. Controversy arose precisely from its on-brand messaging. 

Equinox is a luxury lifestyle brand exclusive to those who can make this part of their lifestyle. In a way, the more exclusivity the campaign exudes to the non-target audience, the more spot-on it is for its own target audience.

This PR stunt has worked. According to Equinox’s chief marketing officer, Jeff De Korte, web traffic to the Equinox website in the first week of January grew by 52% YoY. The spike in traffic also converted to a 30% increase in sales compared to the previous best January.

Creative stunts like this are high-risk, high-reward undertakings that are engineered to attract public attention. They have the potential to make or break a company’s image and reputation. They also might be the quickest way to generate buzz, taking brands from anonymity to fame if successful. 

A mission-driven PR stunt like Equinox’s can raise awareness in the target market instantly without being just a savvy PR move. 

Let’s revisit some of the other most successful mission-driven PR stunts, their impact, and what you can learn from them. 

Mission: Show the world that protecting privacy is simple.

Campaign Cost: $7000 for 4 weeks.

Impact: Doubled user base. 

In 2011, DuckDuckGo was still a one-man-band search engine. To raise awareness, it bought a billboard in San Francisco SOMA district, Google’s backyard, highlighting its privacy focus in contrast to Google. 

It took a swing at Google with the message “Google tracks you. We don’t.”

The campaign latched on to the fame of the brand’s direct competitor to highlight its privacy-focused mission. The billboard led to national press stories in USA Today and Wired. It also doubled the user base at the time.

Mission: To build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

Campaign Cost: Unknown

Impact: Sales rose 30% following the campaign (from new customers rather than from existing customers).

On 2011 Black Friday, Patagonia launched a full-page ad in The New York Times showcasing their best-selling jacket that read “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” They used this ad to urge consumers not to purchase another jacket if they don’t need to during the biggest shopping day. 

The counterintuitive campaign called attention to Patagonia’s mission to “cause no unnecessary harm to the environmental crisis.” To many people’s surprise, this campaign resonated with its target audience so much that it led to a 30% increase in sales from new customers.

Mission: Shave Time. Shave Money.

Campaign Cost: $4500

Impact: Sourced 12,000 customers in 2 days. 1,500+ backlinks that made the brand rank third for the Google Search “shave.”

Dollar Shave Club got millions of views and attention for its launch video “Our Blades Are F**king Great.” The founder, Michael Dubin, created and starred in the video. He used a combination of witty remarks and logic to spotlight how their blades help customers “shave time, shave money.” 

The video became viral so quickly that DSC’s site crashed from too much traffic. As a new brand, it also quickly ranked third for the Google search “shave” thanks to the 1500+ sites that link to its video.

This is why I love TikTok Spark Ads.

Because it checks the boxes for both of these.

And it’s the only ad option that’s a 100% native in-feed format.

So, my friends over at Insense put together a complete guide to TikTok Spark Ads, where you’ll learn:

• 5 UGC attention-grabbing creative types
• How to drive higher conversions through Spark Ads
• How to optimize your TikTok marketing strategy for better ROAS

If TikTok is on the 2023 radar, then download the guide here.

Or you can skip all of that and get straight to converting by booking a demo here.

• A documentary about the PR stunt genius in the entertainment industry — Shep Gordon
• A site that helps you discover trending topics
• Marketers are turning side hustles into businesses
• Been researching product placement, NYT has an interesting piece on it.
• To CBD marketers, Google is about to relax ad bans on CBD hemp products.

*Want to sponsor Marketing Examined? Fill out this Typeform here.*

PR stunts are more than funny campaigns. Using them to amplify your mission will help your brand generate not only publicity but also build a loyal community of those who appreciate your visions and products.

Alex & Chi, out!