Never again” was the conclusion of Wax Communications’ Dave Littlewood, who spent the Bank holiday cycling through the worst of the British weather to complete a 262-mile sponsored charity ride from Lymington to Land’s End.

It was an epic re-run of a charity ride the group of nine undertook 10 years ago, when they were pupils and teachers at Priestlands School, Lymington.

“We felt every one of those 10 years by the time we reached Land’s End. It was grueling and the monsoon weather didn’t help,” said Dave. “But it was a fantastic achievement and a great experience and we’re delighted to have completed it. However, the next reunion is definitely in the pub.”

Wax saw off David and friends in style by designing and sponsoring their cycling gear, as well as making a donation to the cause.

Clients also gave their support in the form of McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes from United Biscuits and Relentless Energy Drink from CCE.

The groups’ efforts in the saddle have raised £1,400 for the Jubilee Sailing Trust – a Southampton-based charity that runs adventure sailing trips for able-bodied and disabled people.

Wax Live’s Experiential Director, Lucy Pearce, comments:

“Brands should be wary of being too corporate or overt in their sponsorship to avoid the possibility of a backlash among festival-goers who will not want to see these events hijacked by commerce,” points out Lucy Pearce, experiential director at Wax Live, part of Wax Communications.

“Constant Bluetooth messaging offering special deals, for example, or advertising hoardings threaten to turn festivals into muddy shopping malls, and that will not got down well with those who see festivals as an alternative to consumer living.”

The full article is in Sales Promotion magazine.

Wax’s Active Kids 08 campaign for Sainsbury’s scoops Gold and Silver at ISP awards

Wax Communications’ (a Media Square plc agency) ongoing Active Kids campaign for Sainsbury’s has won two gongs for this year’s treatment at the ISP awards.

Active Kids 08 (AK08) picked up Silver for ‘Best Long Term Brand Building Campaign’ and swept the category to win a Gold for  ‘Healthy Eating’ from the institute, which recognises the most successful, innovative and well executed sales promotion campaigns each year.

Rod Geoghegan, Wax Business Development Director, says:

“AK has proved a winning campaign in every sense of the word and we are delighted its creativity, its quality and the influence it has had on people have now won recognition from the ISP. We have kept AK vibrant with fresh new ideas, high production values and a belief that we can make it work harder each year.

The results have been phenomenal – it’s a promotion that has truly activated shoppers and their families by promoting healthier eating and exercise, while returning great brand and sales benefits to Sainsbury’s.

“It has grabbed the imagination of everybody, from the organisations and individuals associated with it, the schools and groups who join it, the parents who collect the vouchers and the kids who get to try new active equipment and experiences.

In short it’s an all round success and winning two awards from the ISP is great testament to everybody involved with it.”

Wax has raised the bar on the highly successful four-year Active Kids initiative again this year with a range of exciting developments, including redeemable vouchers for tickets to live sports events and a new focus on citizenship in line with schools’ new curriculum  focus.

The new style Active Kids 08 (AK08), which launched on 14 February, also went global for the first time offering participants the opportunity to collect vouchers for packs of sports equipment to donate to schools in developing countries.

AK08 aimed to engage even more teenagers and with this in mind, WAX produced a bespoke catalogue which features equipment and active experiences to appeal to them.

Schools and groups will be able to use vouchers for tickets to see their rugby, netball and basketball heroes in action or to ‘buy’ dance, fitness and martial arts training at their own venues from local coaches.

The Active Kids website has also been refreshed to offer a highly user-friendly experience and provide facilities such as a forum and easier ways to browse the online catalogue and create an order.

A spokesperson for Sainsbury’s says:

“The awards are thoroughly deserved. Every year we’re amazed by the success of this scheme. In year one the public raised a fantastic £17m worth of equipment and experiences.

In year two, they took it to an incredible £34 million and last year they smashed this, taking it to £52 million. Active Kids has really come of age: it’s bursting with ideas and inspiration for all ages, abilities and interests and is a worthy winner of the institute’s recognition.”

It is easy to measure how a promotional activity has performed, according to this Marketing Week article 22.05.08.

. The nature of the discipline, particularly in the retail sector, means that a quick look at the sales activity during the promotional period or counting the numbers of coupons redeemed is a fairly accurate indicator of consumer response.

But brands want more than just a sales spike from their promotions. All promotions and incentives must now prove that they can be part of the brand engagement process.

But how can this be proved?Planning director at Wax Communications Craig Buchanan-Smith says promotional activity has to be measured as part of an over-arching campaign rather than a separate activity.

“If promotions are used to help build brands, they need to be treated as part of the overall marketing campaign and should be measured against the overall needs of the brand.”

Voucher collection

He refers to the work done with Sainsbury’s Active Kids.

“At its heart is a simple idea around the collection of vouchers, but you can’t measure the effect of the activity for Sainsbury’s just on redemption – it has also done a great deal of good for the overall brand.”

Marketers and brand owners are starting to see promotional activity in a broader context as the short-term impact of sales promotions begins to wear thin. Director at Differentiate Chris Radford says: “Repeat studies have shown that below-the-line promotional activity such as price cuts and incentives can stimulate a short-term sales life, but sales will return to their previous levels once the offer ends.”

Radford cites two examples of promotions that lift sales but don’t ultimately sustain growth. “Mobile phone companies are all so busy trying to ‘out promote’ each other that customer turnover remains high and so they are continually having to refill a leaky bucket.

“Packaged goods businesses can get sucked into a vicious circle of buy one, get one free promotions or big discounts. This produces short-term sales lifts, but they encourage customers to wait for the next offer, rather than truly convincing them to buy into the branding on an ongoing level,” he says.

Such short-termism has prompted a drive to ensure that promotional campaigns do more than temporarily lift sales. The traditional belief of the linear link between cause and effect for promotional communication has had to make way for something more sophisticated.

“Current promotional marketing best practice dictates that promotions should drive response and reinforce desired brand perceptions,” says 23red planning director Carol Stickler.

She says that broader promotional objectives necessitate broader measurement. “It is relatively easy to measure narrowly. But if the objective is to build the brand, you need to also track other brand measures.”

Integrated campaigns

But Stickler acknowledges that “as ever with integrated campaigns, isolating the effect is the tricky part”. She says time-series or regional analysis would need to be carried out to see what happens at the times or in regions where you give your brand no promotional support.

“The key is to clarify objectives and means of measurement up front as well as isolate the role of promotional marketing within the wider communications mix. Then you need to identify the primary target for the promotion as well as secondary targets, such as the impact of acquisition campaign on customer loyalty,” she adds.

Victoria White, head of activation at activationtmw – the sales promotion arm of Tullo Marshall Warren – says: “Alongside measuring how a promotion has worked, brands should take into account ’soft’ achievements which can result from activity as opposed to driving sales. For example, the introduction of brands to a new target audience, or providing support for retailers.

Long-term growth

“All of these measures can be important for a brand’s long-term growth and should be considered alongside a return on investment.” However, Stickler acknowledges the difficulty of isolating the impact a promotion has, apart from a temporary sales lift.

Founding partner at Mesh Marketing Toby Moore comments: “To understand promotional impact on sales requires the unravelling of the consumer brand experience and the customer ‘promotional’ price support. If we could better understand this relationship then brands would have firmer foundations to allocate and measure their marketing spends.”

The greatest challenge facing promotions, it seems, is not that it should be accountable or measurable, but that it is able to tread the line between creating new customers and getting existing ones to spend more money and at the same time staying deftly in tune with whatever lofty brand proposition is being pumped out.

Wax Communication’s Business Development Director, Rod Geoghegan, had this letter to Campaign on BOGOF’s featured as the lead letter.

ASA bargains with government to keep promotions ‘free’

Well done Baroness Peta Buscombe, the ASA’s chief executive, for securing a pledge from the Government that ‘bogofs’ and other ‘free’ promotions will not fall foul of new consumer protection rules expected to be approved by Parliament next week.

If the Eurocrats had had their way, under the European Union directives on unfair commercial practices and misleading and comparative advertising, they would have shelved the term for fear of misleading the public.

‘Free’, according to the EU, should only be allowed in relation to samples and gifts that do not require more than the “unavoidable” cost of a postage stamp or telephone call.

But ‘buy one get one free’ has become a part of the British vernacular, since its introduction reportedly by the Iceland supermarket chain. People like it. They feel they are getting a bargain – and that’s what’s important.

Everybody here understands perfectly well what ‘bogof’ means (if you buy one, you don’t pay for the other one) and have become very attached to it. To suggest otherwise is patronizing at best, definitely daft and insidious at worst.

And it’s a small semantic step to ‘two for the price of one’, which Brussels are ok with, and importantly the same money to the consumer.

Congratulations to the ASA for keeping Britain free from the semantic meddling of those people who clearly don’t speak our language or understand our shopping culture.