As every year for the 15 that we have been their UK PR agency, Christmas is Guylian’s most important sales period, so the pressure was on to deliver both quantity and quality of media coverage to help drive sales.

Things were looking good from a ytd perspective as our media campaigns for Valentine’s Day and Easter had exceeded 2017’s KPI targets. To continue this momentum through the all-important festive period and meet our stretching Christmas targets our strategy was two fold:

• Start early – we started media communications in the summer to meet ‘Christmas in July’ editorial deadlines for the glossy women’s monthly magazines (an important target for Guylian). This approach then morphed into a ‘drip campaign’ by media type/deadline with women’s weekly titles, regional and national supplements, blogs, websites, broadcast and dailies as the year progressed.
• Balancing the hero and the new – Guylian’s Signature Sea Shells remain central to the brand’s success, but an ongoing challenge for us to sell into the media as something exciting and topical. To get around this we positioned the new 33% bigger Shell format as even better for sharing during the festive season. For the two new Christmas 2016 products – Temptations Pouch Packs and Assorted Luxury Chocolate Tasting boxes – journalists enjoyed the challenge of picking their favourites during press visits.

Our Christmas media relations campaign exceeded targets by achieving 42 pieces of coverage including 12 in magazines, 11 online, 8 in regional media, and 3 in national newspapers.