Happy's marketing news - 12.05.17
It’s been a busy week in the marketing world, here’s what has caught our eye!
Pudsey Bear has been bought out! Manchester-based Brand Addition, which makes promotional merchandise for companies such as the BBC, Calvin Klein and Google, has been acquired in a secondary management buyout for a reported £60m. The company has been bought by private equity company Elysian Capital from HIG Capital, which acquired the group from 4imprint in a £24m deal in 2012.
The John Lewis Partnership has hinted to upcoming marketing synergies between its John Lewis and Waitrose brands; a change in strategy given how it has previously kept both of their advertising very separate. The change in approach comes after the partnership undertook research which found that the partnership’s top 10% of the partnership’s retail customers now drive 60% of overall revenues, with the majority of them shopping regularly at both John Lewis and Waitrose. As a result, the business says it is starting to merge the marketing for its two loyalty schemes.
There’s been more troubling news for social media giant Snapchat this week as shares in its owner have sunk after it reported disappointing growth in the first three months of the year. In its first results since floating, Snap said the number of daily active users rose just 5% to 166 million compared with the last three months of 2016. That was two million fewer than expected, but 36% higher than the same period last year. The news sent shares tumbling more than 20% in after-hours trading in New York.
Coca-Cola is launching its annual summer campaign just weeks after axing one of its worst-selling brands, Coke Life. The new campaign is an evolution of its hugely-popular and successful 2014 ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, which saw Coca-Cola put thousands of names across 100 million packs. This year, however, the soft drinks giant is taking a different approach by including holiday destinations instead and offering consumers the chance to win their “dream holiday”.
Facebook is getting tough on spam-ware. Websites that harbour “disruptive, shocking or malicious” adverts will appear less frequently on user’s news feeds, Facebook has said. The social network is tweaking the algorithm that picks posts for feeds to do a better job of spotting “low quality” web pages. Instead, the algorithm will seek out more informative posts. It said the change was part of broader work it was doing to make Facebook less profitable for spammers.
