Before I begin I need to let you know that if Christmas was a rock band I’d have the t-shirt, bed covers and probably a wall covered in ticket stubs from their gigs. I am a Christmas freak and proud, anyone who has ever worked with me will tell you I’m the one who organises secret Santa and my nieces and nephews will tell you that they always get something suitably noisy and garish from me (that is also partly because I enjoy the look of pain on their parent’s faces). So you can imagine my excitement when we came up with the latest concept for The Meat Crusade Christmas PR.
Marketing people like me are always trying to come up with new and innovative ways to get your attention at this time of year. As a graduate I cut my teeth in the world of weird and wonderful PR stunts which included promoting a building that mooed like a cow every hour (that’s a story for another time). It’s not something I do often but when done correctly it can be a very effective tool.
Christmas is without a doubt the busiest time in the butchers’ calendar, they usually start thinking about it in June when the rest of us are packing our suitcases and heading off on our holidays. There is one thing that all the butchers I speak to seem to agree on. The festive period is without a doubt their busiest; it is also the most frustrating for them. This is because so many people only visit them once a year for their Christmas meat.
In October I came up with the idea of putting out a story all about a butcher being for life and not just for Christmas. The rise in popularity of shows such as Mary Portas demonstrates that people in the UK want to preserve the high street and the feeling of community that it brings. But without regular trade many of these shops won’t survive and butchers are one of them.
A story like this needed a good accompanying photo but what to have? We needed something that hadn’t been done before, something that said butcher and Christmas all at the same time. My boss instantly brought up the idea of a tree covered in butcher's products. The best ideas are the simplest ones and we all said yes!
Great titters went up as to what we could do, a star wrapped in streaky bacon was a given. Lumineetta bacon (for years I've been calling it weird tinsel) and meat balls for baubles. The tinsel would be sausages, of course. We always use a different customer each time we do this and Hutchinsons of Ripley was our choice. Peter Buck and Nick Allen are great butchers and they were great sports, instantly buying into the idea.
My hands become completely useless when it comes to making ‘pretty’ things so thank goodness for the other Meat Crusaders who were fair fairer of hand than I. The end result is a story with accompanying photos that has gained so much traffic on social media and coverage in the media. It’s not the sort of thing we’ll be doing often, I certainly won’t be dressing up as a giant steak anytime soon. But what they hey tis the season and we all enjoy a bit of festive fun to brighten the dark nights.
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