PR Opportunity For Greggs Past Its Sell-By Date?

  • PR

When Labour leader Ed Miliband and Ed Balls stopped to buy sausage rolls at a Greggs shop this week, the pasty company’s PR eyes must have rolled, cartoon-style, to the $ sign.

It all follows the debate over heightened VAT rules on hot takeaway food which, you have to admit, tax or no tax, has been fun watching from the PR sidelines.
Greggs-keep-calm-and-carry-on-missed-PR-opportunity-Umpf

David Cameron tried to board the pasty bandwagon but couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one – I’ve tried that one, David, but my waistline suggests it was fairly recently. And fairly frequently.

Gaff aside, it must have delighted the West Cornwall Pasty Company who Cameron name-checked, saying he’d last had one of their pasties at Leeds train station (turns out the outlet had already shut when he’d claimed to have eaten it and the anecdote started to crumble).

The one thing I’m surprised at is that Greggs hasn’t been more proactive in all this. I haven’t seen any clever PR or social media piggybacking.
Umpf-excellent-pasty-gate-PR-for-Morrisons
Surely they’d be trialling some pasties with politician’s faces on? Or what about limited edition staff aprons (here’s one, above right, Umpf has mocked up).

Top marks then to Morrisons’ PR team who negotiated a reader offer with The Sun today. Above the front-page simmering pasty-gate story is their “FREE (hot or cold) Sausage Roll” for all Sun readers.

Let’s make no bones about it, they will be paying for this, if not in placement fee to the paper, then in the cost of dishing out hundreds of thousands of sausage rolls.

But in my view, it’s astute thinking from their PR people and, at 65p, rams home their value message better than Greggs has done.