WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY WANTED:

SCALA Consulting is a leading international consultancy based in Huddersfield, UK, which specialises in procurement, supply chain, logistics and customer service, working with major clients across the grocery, FMCG and home appliances industries.

A client of PR Agency One since 2018, SCALA relied upon the agency for communications support during the COVID-19 pandemic. The business tasked us with ensuring that SCALA and the wider industry were the subject of positive media attention at a time when the retail, FMCG and logistics sectors were under a tremendous amount of strain, as well as profiling the unparalleled global supply chain and logistics expertise held by SCALA’s consultants.

NEWSJACKING: WHAT WE DID:

In a sentence: our corporate and FMCG PR experts hijacked the news agenda with engaging takes on both current and future affairs.

In order to build brand awareness of SCALA as a trusted thought leader bringing the industry together during the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched a mini thought-leadership led newsjacking PR campaign.

Speed is everything in effective newsjacking, and we ensured that SCALA was the go-to expert media relied upon for COVID-19 insights by proactively creating and issuing expert comments on how COVID-19 might impact businesses in February – a full month before the virus hit UK shores. This swift activity generated fantastic national coverage for SCALA and ensured its consultants were front of mind for journalists looking for an expert viewpoint as the pandemic escalated over the coming weeks.

We then built upon this initial activity with both proactive and reactive commentary as – and before – stories broke, as well as placing interviews for SCALA consultants with influential national and international print and broadcast media, to share their expertise with both their engaged stakeholder base and the public more widely.  

Furthermore, we also secured long-form thought leadership commissions with influential industry media titles, allowing us to showcase SCALA’s in-house expertise in greater depth. Finally, we capitalised upon this momentum with the announcement of SCALA’s move to create a COVID-19 industry collaboration group which, due to the businesses’ now sterling reputation was covered widely across national, retail and logistics media.

The underpinning objective of all activity across the campaign was to ensure SCALA could capitalise on the rapidly-changing news agenda, including consumer stockpiling, supply chain interruptions and the changing face of logistics as our buying habits and demand patterns changed by the day.

As a result of this work, consultants from the business are now viewed as trusted contacts for both national and international journalists covering the FMCG and supply chain industries, as well as business more generally. These journalists now regularly approach SCALA consultants for expert comment and interview around ongoing COVID-19 developments, as well as other pertinent global issues affecting supply chains such as Brexit.  

NEWSJACKING COVERAGE HIGHLIGHTS:

Over the course of our newsjacking campaign, we placed interviews and expert comment from SCALA consultants with the likes of BBC News, The Financial Times, WIRED, CNN Business – which was nationally syndicated across the USA – The Daily Telegraph, TalkRADIO, The Grocer, Internet Retailing and the Daily Star – to name just a few.

REACTIVE PR CAMPAIGN RESULTS:

In the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic we secured:

89 pieces of coverage across national print and broadcast channels, as well as key industry titles such as The Grocer.

Combined reach: 43,599,647 – a 2,149% increase in exposure for the brand compared with the previous year

100% inclusion of the SCALA Consulting brand in media coverage secured

38 high-quality backlinks with a domain authority of 30+

309% increase in brand awareness year-on-year

81% increase in contact form fills on the SCALA website year-on-year over this period

To find out more about how we create and implement reactive PR campaigns, get in touch using our contact page, or call us direct on:

• Manchester: 0161 871 9140
• London: 0203 092 1446