RETAIL RANDOMS

BEFORE YOU GO...COLOUR CATCHER | GROCERYAID

PR WASHOUT

PR TARTED UP AS LEGIT RESEARCH – A USER’S GUIDE

As regular readers of SLR will know, we do love a bit of PR tarted up as legitimate research. It’s an infuriatingly common practice in the world of PR these days – and here’s a fine example of how to do it that arrived on our desk this week from the good people at Colour Catcher:

1. Come up with a weird, attention-grabbing headline then link it to something current. Covid is ideal. In this instance: “1 in 10 Scots are purposely damaging their other half ’s laundry following a feud in lockdown!”

2. Always refer to it as a study, not a press release, and reference bizarre insights. In this instance: “Key highlights from the study include: a quarter of couples go two to three days not speaking after laundry sabotage.”

3. Hide the methodology and scope of your ‘research’ and always refer to your sample size as “nationally representative”. In this instance, it’s buried right at the bottom of the release where few journalists will ever reach.

4. Use charts to make it look official and like proper research. In this instance, there are two charts highlighting the “Top colours to run” and the “Top clothes causing colour damage”.

5. Keep up the ‘research’ ruse right until you spring the sales line. In this instance, there are four paragraphs and two charts before you get to: “Rachel Ferreira, from Colour Catcher, comments: “To help make life at home easier, we are getting people in Scotland to #DareToMix with our new campaign by using Colour Catcher

in every wash. This simple addition to the washing will not only prevent colour run accidents but also protect the brightness of clothes and save up to two hours a week on time spent doing the laundry.”

6. Don’t forget to add the price, a link to where people can buy it and, for added measure, launch a social media ‘challenge’, as highlighted above.

Job done.

AND A WEE WORD FROM PETER...

It’s all very well having a joke and a laugh and a bit of bantz, but we’re well aware of how challenging life is for many of us at the moment, including some of our industry colleagues. SLR is represented on both the GroceryAid Scotland Committee and GroceryAid’s national committee for independent retailers, so we hear a lot of the stories first hand.

With that in mind, we thought it would worth sharing with you a video made recently by Scottish committee co-Chairman Peter Steel, formerly of McCurrach’s. Give it a watch – but most importantly, make sure that everyone that you work with knows that GroceryAid can help in many different ways. It’s ok to need some help sometimes, it really is.