“Does PR work? Duh....!”

Posted by serge.beckers | Posted on Sep 2, 2011 | 0 reviews

I'm going to go out on a limb here and share a PR success story with you. Why ‘the limb’? Because I don’t want to create the impression that I’m just here to pitch our company or our profession. On the other hand: we’re quite proud of this achievement and would like you to be able to profit from it. This case is a great example of how well-thought-out communication can help a company achieve its goals, such as raising awareness for its products or services and generating hard sales leads.

So here it goes. Although this example is not health care related as such, I hope you get something out of it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The challenge

Centrosolar Benelux B.V. is part of Centrosolar Group AG, Germany. Centrosolar Group AG is a stock market listed company in the field of solar energy with over 1.000 employees throughout Europe, which annually sells more than 20.000 solar cells for roof systems. They produce most parts of the solar systems themselves in their ‘Sonnenstromfabrik’ in Germany.

Centrosolar Benelux came to Wisse Kommunikatie because of their ambition to extend their area of distribution in the Netherlands. Therefore, all PR activitities for Centrosolar are targeted at enhancing awareness for solar energy and Centrosolar and generating more sales leads in the Netherlands.

As part of their penetration into the Dutch market, Centrosolar planned to introduce a new project called the 'PV-privéplan' (Private Photo Voltaic Project). This plan was stooled on the earlier Dutch govermental project called ‘PC-privé’, which made the purchase of personal computers more appealing. It did so by offering attractive discounts when one bought his or her PC through its employer. Centrosolars project is similar to the PC project in several ways: this project was set up to promote solar energy (PV) for the private sector, and it does so by means of forming collectivities at work, therewith gaining considerable purchase discounts.

With the introduction of this new project, the PR goals were threefold:

•  Positioning Centrosolar as producer of German quality solar systems with the highest efficiency
•  Enhancing awareness for Centrosolar in the Netherlands and generating new sales leads
•  Enhancing awareness for Centrosolars ‘PV-priveplan’ in the Netherlands and generating sales leads for this particular project

The strategy and action

To achieve these goals, we firstly set up extensive briefing sessions with the client, executed a media-audit, populated a database with relevant journalists, evaluated trends and issues in the market for solar energy and developped several standard documents for clarification of Centrosolars project the ‘PV-priveplan’.

The most important messages were targeted at ‘convincing’ the target groups, since Dutch house owners did not yet seem to be convinced of the benefits of placing solar systems on their roofs. Therefore, every message was summing up both the benefits of solar energy in general and the benefits of Centrosolars solar systems in specific.

We found that there were two possible ways to introduce Centrosolars new project: by means of a guerilla campaign or by leveraging current issues. The latter seemed most lucrative and therefore, the fist press release on the introduction of the project was sent out after a TV show about consumer disputes called ‘Tros Radar’. In this show special attention went out to solar energy and the ROI in solar energy for Dutch consumers. This item gained much attention in Dutch media. Thanks to our accurate timing and our responding in a positive manner to the message broadcasted (by offering a solution), we gained lots of free publicity for Centrosolar and its new project.

The results

In terms of publicity, we managed to get media attention for Centrosolar on more than 80 occasions in the first three months, of which more then 65 articles were exclusively(!) dedicated to Centrosolar. The estimated advertising costs were  - based on print media alone - over 47.000 euros and the estimated coverage of print media alone was over 700.000 euros. Some of the media in the Netherlands in which Centrosolar was placed were De Volkskrant, MVO Nederland, Installatienet, Bouw & Wonen and Sprout Business Network Magazine.

For Centrosolars PV-priveplan project, this led to no less than 25 large scale, concrete b2b sales leads.

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