By Patrick Avenell
BSR Australia, the buying group behind Betta Electrical, is currently ramping up its profile, with a series of promotional activities planned for this month.
At the centre of this campaign is the most traditional of retail marketing tools, the catalogue, but with the help of television, the internet and public relations, Betta has implemented a more diverse strategy to stimulate sales.
There are three main facets of this promotion: a Bras N Things voucher with selected Sunbeam products, a $100 Betta gift voucher with selected Breville products, and a double pass to a recently released movie with purchase of selected IT products. The promotions themselves aren’t particularly groundbreaking, but the promotion of the promotion is interesting.
Firstly, BSR has retained a public relations firm to push the campaign in magazines and newspapers. Whilst PR is ubiquitous on the supplier side of this industry, it is uncommon for a retailer to engage professional communications. Harvey Norman, Good Guys and JB Hi-Fi never send out releases, whilst Bing Lee only hired a PR firm to help organise its 50th Birthday celebrations.
Public Relations is an expensive exercise – upwards of $10,000 per month for complete coverage – so practitioners have to be good. If you read any stories simply regurgitating details of this BSR promotion, then this has been money well spent.
BSR Group marketing manager Julieanne Worchurst told Current.com.au that further promotion of this promotion will come via a letterbox drop, targeted free-to-air and pay TV advertising campaign and the Betta website. Having this broad coverage enables Worchurst to be confident that this particular post-Mother’s Day campaign will be a success.
“Our promotions always perform well on redemption rate – we achieve over what the industry standard is for redemption rates,” she said. “Promotion drives catalogue sales.”