Pimm’s takes of the Big Ben
Pimm’s is a british brand that produces and sells summer drinks, including fruit cups and alcoholic drinks. It has been around since 1823. The drinks are numberd as Pimm’s No. 1,2 … Cup.
At some point the company was on the brink of collapse and they have lost year after year. The acquisition of the Distillers Company helped them a bit. However, what helped them most was producing good marketing campaigns.
Primm’s slogan is “Primm’s o’clock” and in their twitter home page under company description they have “Everything stops for Primm’s O’clock”. For 2016 April Fool’s day, they the company tried to take the slogan a step further. They hired veteran news correspondent, Peter Sissons, to film the video for the Fool’s day campaign. Campaign is “It’s Pimm’s O’Clock on Big Ben”. According to the “news”, Primm’s is sponsoring the restoration of the clock tower and its logo will be on Big Ben.
What do you think happened? Was it successful? Did the company get anything out of it? Well, it is hard to know the ROI of the this campaign, but few things are for sure. Primm’s has very small number of Twitter followers (5592 followers) and small retweet numbers (1105). The company’s twitter account has been active since 2010. Only people 18+ age can join their twitter account. So, there are many limitations that explain the small fan base on twitter. But what’s remarkable is the significant engagement of the twitter fans of the Big Ben takeover Fool’s video campaing. I checked Keyhole, Social mention and other sites but couldn’t get the statistics. Hence, i am making my own engagement calculations. Assume that out of 1332 following at a moment, only 1000 saw the twitter post at the time it was shared. Then, if i combine the likes and retweets (178+138=316) and divide that number by 1000, I will have 31.6% engagement rate. This is the engagement rate of the Primm’s Big Ben Fool’s campaign. Now compare that with 0.1% engagement rate of regular twitter posts. Clearly one can see the effectiveness of the campaign if only we measured the success of the campaign by reach and engagement rate.
Another measurement for their youtube channel. For any other video the company produced thus far, maximum views any received was capped at 14,000. However, this “Pimm’s Sponsor Big Ben” video was viewed 196,100 times, about 13–14 times the number of views of the most successful campaign video of the company.
So clearly, from cultural and bran perspective, the campaign was a success. From revenue perspective, it is hard to assess if the campaign raised their sales. Even if it had a positive impact, it will affect the sales over time, not in the next 4 days. Clearly, they spent money to make this high quality video with the veteran news correspondent, which i bet costs a ton. However, it is hard to assess if it has benefited more in terms of reaching out the right target and potentially increasing the sales of the coming quarters. All i can say is that Primm’s was able to engage audience, reach more people and become one of the most successful companies to pull off its April Fool’s campaign.
