Dee Set
PR and Communications
Dee Set Group is one of the UK’s largest field marketing agencies that helps major retail brands sell more. Its particular expertise lies in improving and optimising brands’ sales performance across the Big Four supermarkets.
With no past experience of PR, Dee Set came to Smoking Gun with two core challenges.
Following major investment into big data and AI technology that was on the cusp of disrupting the grocery industry, the business was lacking a distinctive brand voice and needed strategic brand positioning support.
It needed an agency to lead the planning and execution of a new product ‘Reapp’, including a website from which to launch.
Reapp is a one-stop shop for brands looking to better understand their sales performance and use this information to guide their strategy.
The business sought to grow its profile and that of its C Suite through trade and national media, positioning the group as thought leaders in people, data and tech.
With retail bible The Grocer in its sights and ambitious plans to tell Dee Set’s story far and wide, Smoking Gun set to work growing B2B fame for the business.
Smoking Gun introduced Dee Set’s CSuite to influential retail writers across the nationals and trade press to showcase their knowledge and expertise, build relationships and stay front-of mind for breaking stories requiring industry comment.
Dee Set created ‘Reapp’, the AI-driven app which turns complex data from multiple sources into simple, actionable insights for brands to drive sales growth at scale and speed.
From this platform, Smoking Gun was perfectly positioned to launch a proactive communications campaign, positioning Reapp as experts in the grocery market.
Using Reapp’s analytics capabilities, Smoking Gun performed data-led storytelling by identifying newsworthy angles through AI gathered retail insights to share with the media. We built a library of thought leadership on topics such as British shoppers’ behaviour, ready to pitch at key moments in the retail calendar.
We monitored news and trends across retail and the major supermarkets daily to secure newsjacking opportunities with timely expert commentary, and secured backlinks from high domain authority outlets to the new website.
The media relations campaign transformed Reapp from an unknown business to becoming the go-to commentator on grocery retail topics in the press. The activity cemented their position as industry leaders and left its competitors in the dust as it dominated media share of voice.
We used Reapp’s capabilities to perform data-led storytelling and drive brand awareness across trade, business, regional, broadcast, national and international media.
We introduced Reapp to top media targets like The Financial Times and The Grocer, which led to multiple examples of earned media coverage, and developed relationships with the most influential editors to become their go-to spokespeople for breaking stories.
Working closely with Reapp’s data experts, we identified relevant news trends tied to cultural moments to gather insights on. We then developed these into news hooks and stories to pitch to a variety of media – going beyond the trade and getting onto the national business and tech pages, as well as broadcast, where investors would be watching:
Angles included:
We developed relationships between top journalists and Reapp’s C Suite, regularly contributing to features using Reapp data and expertise to showcase knowledge – and build all-important backlinks too.
Reapp held HFSS focused trials in stores across the UK – discovering HFSS-compliant brands were seeing up to 10% growth. We arranged exclusive interviews with The Grocer on these findings, securing multiple channels of coverage across the trade bible.
We helped announce the Wagestream initiative, which allows Dee Set employees to withdraw their wages at any point of the month, to target regional media, expanding our reach even further.
Not content simply to target the media, Smoking Gun helped Reapp excite its potential customers with a creative mailer. We designed replica front covers of The Grocer, depicting the respective brands’ progression in the future if they were to choose Reapp to help support their FMCG growth.
We supported the business through its acquisition by Acosta Europe, shaping day one strategy and messaging as well as announcing the news to media with hero coverage in The Grocer and other trade and business publications.
The results:
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