Group Organisation: What are we going to promote?

On Friday 25th February the group met up in the library to discuss what our PR campaign would be promoting. It took us a while to decide because I think we may have been over thinking the task and we were trying to come up with something realistic and clever.

At first we had the idea of trying to promote mother and baby packs to fit inside already available disaster packs. We came up with this idea after discussing events that were happening in the news, we considered the earthquake in New Zealand, the forest fires and floods in Australia and America and also the war devastation in the Middle East at the moment. We did initial research into what sort of survival packs were already available from charities such as Shelter Box and The Red Cross. Most of these boxes seemed to pack the most essential items necessary for survival: tents, sleeping bags, blankets, torches, water sachets and cooking equipment. But there were very few pieces that were especially for babies or for women. We wanted to include nappies, feeding bottles, baby wipes, a cuddly toy, tampons, spare pants etc. We thought if we promoted these packs to Westernised countries they might be better received as some third world countries may not be used to some of the items anyway, so providing them might not be worth the expenditure. Also, Shelter Box explained how they don't always provide box receivers with all the items as some countries a likely to have access to them and can provide them to those in need.

After more thought we decided to go with something totally different. We chose a very remote people, Eskimos. They live in continents all over the world and they are people content with the way they live and who don't like to integrate with modern society, preferring to keep their culture and traditions alive. These are the perfect target demographic as they are relatively unknown compared to other cultures and this would present us with a challenge in terms of research and promotion. We considered what we already knew about Eskimos and conducted some initial research into them on the internet as a group. In the end we decided that pitching a fairly basic but essential Western product to them would be the best thing to do. As they aren't keen on modern ways of living we thought technology would be too difficult, but considering the conditions they live in, being cold and bad for their skin, we thought moisturiser would be ideal. It's a product nearly everyone uses or has used at some point in Western culture and it's a product we think could improve Eskimo's appearances and ways of living. The point of a PR campaign is to promote an idea or product to people who may not have even considered it before, either because they are unaware it exists or because they have survived without it before.

Our mission is to come up with a campaign to promote and sell moisturiser to Eskimos.

This is how we have broken down the research:

Target demographic research: Becky Ricks

Media Research, including advertising and marketing: Fiona Davies & Hannah Kirby

Branding (the product itself and brand/ company statement) : Sarah Kenny

Budgeting & Finance: Millie Delacoe