Leapfrog Public Relations Agency

Foodie News 18/05/12

Publish date 18/05/2012 Frog

Hello again Foodie Fans; fancy seeing you here! Here’s our pick of the top stories this week:

Felicity: Great PR for CafeDirect earlier this week when their report on how climate change is affecting coffee growers in Peru got picked up by the Guardian amongst others. The report itself is a great trade story but by providing such a great supplier case study, Cepicafe, Cafe Direct was able to tap into the national media market. The human angle is the most important aspect of any great story and CafeDirect has used this to their advantage – resulting in a brilliant piece of coverage that talks about their plan of action to combat the problem and ends with a sentence about the new harvest of coffee beans coming in to the UK in the next few weeks. I wonder how many many people will pick up a coffee to go from Cafe Direct after this great piece of CSR?

Angharad: I think I’ve found the mother of all creative PR stories this week! Land Rover asked its agency Y&R Dubai to create a handy Desert Survival Guide for its drivers. Doesn’t sound foodie related? Well it is when I tell you they’ve made it edible! As a brand that invites its customers to take off-road adventures Land Rover obivously realised that whilst their cars might be able to stand the heat in a desert most human beings wouldn’t last very long. The guide features a reflective cover to signal for help; the metal binding can be used as a hunting weapon and the pages contain useful information about surviving as well as a map if you feel you could actually walk home. Best of all – if you get really desperate – the pages are made of potato-based starch paper and printed with glycerin based ink so are 100% safe to actually EAT. I’d get lost soon though because survival has an expiration date of February 2013.

This is brilliant PR for Land Rover who, after an original print run of just 5,000 have extended it to an extra 70,000 as the campaign idea went viral. You can read about how Y&R came up with idea here.