How do you bring a property rooted in the book industry and give it mass appeal?
In 2023, year six of the An Post Irish Book Awards sponsorship, our business faced a growing threat – declining affinity levels, particularly among younger audiences, key for the future of our business.
Letter writing, historically our core business, is in gradual decline. Our constant challenge is to engage new audiences, as we strive to grow our new financial services and ecommerce products, identified as key growth drivers. While competing against national and international competitors.
We needed to build brand affinity!
So we asked new questions of our sponsorship property:
- Could this hard-working sponsorship help us nurture and build emotional connections to our brand, helping address this audience decline?
- Could we shift the sponsorship focus from the book industry to mass market instead, attracting younger audiences, helping to make our products and services more relevant?
Then we made a bold decision. Rather than wage a war on screens – an obvious tactic for a book sponsorship – we instead embraced screens, as they delivered a platform to reach engaged audiences.
By working closely with influencers, building a subcommunity on TikTok and living our brand purpose, we not only brought this sponsorship to the forefront of our marketing activity, into the public sphere, but also delivered for the business, growing brand affinity levels and the bottom line, including a large increase in parcel sales.
Elevating the brand from our audience daily transactions to a deeper audience connection.
