The Search for Britain’s Perfect Scone/ Mackenzie & Cruickshank
Mackenzie & Cruickshank is a family-run garden centre and department store in Forres, North East Scotland. Stocking everything from garden gnomes to gladioli, the centre’s popular tearoom’s home-baking is also something of a local legend – selling 50,000 of their home-made scones per year.
Platform PR was asked to come up with a quick, quirky and cost-effective way to promote the garden centre tearoom, and its sister cafe in its store on Forres High Street.
The Brief
Increase the profile of Mackenzie & Cruickshank locally and nationally
Highlight the role of Mackenzie & Cruickshank as a successful local employer
Increase visitors to both tearooms
What We Did
- We decided to capitalise on the popularity of Mackenzie & Cruickshank’s home baking by launching a UK-wide search for Britain’s Perfect Scone.
- From the beginning, the public helped us generate a stream of quirky news hooks with their bizarre recipes: baked bean & sausage; haggis & cheese; and gin & tonic were just some of the suggestions we received.
- A local design agency set up a dedicated website, www.perfectscone.com, to make it easy for customers to get involved and submit their recipes. Offline, people could pick up an entry form at the garden centre.
- We also created a social media release with images and links, designed to be spread via social networking sites.
- We sent individual letters, along with some unusual scones to sample, to radio and television personalities, with a call to action to help us find “Britain’s Perfect Scone”. Sample scones were posted or hand-delivered to local and national newspapers.
- Meanwhile, tearoom customers were able to literally have their cake and eat it as each flavour was tested by the in-store bakers and trialled throughout May in a scone taste test.
- Finally, the top three scone flavours were made into mini scones for customers to sample and vote on their favourite flavour. After a heated contest, we broke the news that the search was over, Britain’s Perfect Scone was revealed to be....Honey and Pecan.
What We Delivered
- During the campaign, visitor numbers at the garden centre tearoom increased by 14%, and at the High Street tearoom by 10%.
- We persuaded some high-profile media stars to back our campaign: BBC Scotland’s Fred MacAulay Show and STV’s magazine show The Hour both ran segments debating the merits of the shortlisted creations and the status of the scone as a treasured British culinary tradition.
- We even got a mention (between mouthfuls) on Terry Wogan’s BBC 2 breakfast show.
- We reached a combined audience of more than 9 million people and received more than 300 competition entries.
- We achieved coverage in all target media outlets – often, more than once – generating articles in everything from the Sunday Times, to The Sun, to the Forres Gazette.
- We delivered prominent broadcast spots with a combined audience of 6,699,000 – including a tasting on STV’s flagship early-evening show.
- Online, our story featured on 10 different sites. The social media release was picked up on Facebook and Twitter, resulting in exclusively ‘Twitter-generated’ coverage on regional news site Moray Firth Live.
- In total, the AVE for all coverage was £74,421, and the tone unremittingly positive.
And the cherry on the top - our key messages were carried in almost all of the coverage generated
