Hampers.com is a business that cares deeply about the emotional impact they have on their customers. After experiencing a challenging Christmas whereby delivery dates were delayed due to external market conditions, the business wanted to find a way to reconnect with their customers and rebuild trust and loyalty. The ecommerce gifting brand approached POLARIS with the challenge and asked the team to ideate a brand communication strategy to achieve their objective.
POLARIS ideated, planned and executed a campaign titled "just because" leveraging Valentines day for its focus on emotion and relationships. The campaign was hugely successful, with over 2000 users, and national press & media coverage coverage.
POLARIS formulated and held a strategy workshop onsite with the hampers team to discuss their business in more detail. The focus of the session was to uncover the purpose, vision and values of the business that results in customers having a great experience with the brand.
Remembering our core objective of rebuilding trust, we firstly looked at the core values of the clients business and what we could use as a base for ideating upon.
The fact that valentines day was the next major gifting milestone in the diary after Christmas was a perfect opportunity as both the clients brand and valentines day shared a similar value; connecting with someone personally to feel joy.
Given that the clients target audience may not all have been in a relationship or tied to celebrating valentines day necessarily, we decided to make valentine’s day a totally inclusive occasion, not just couples in love, but for anyone, anywhere, regardless of relationship status.
We wanted to reposition Valentine’s Day as a moment to celebrate love in all its forms, not just romance, and to help the brand stand out with an inclusive, feel-good message.
By broadening the focus in this way, we would be able to expose the brand to more customer segments than valentine’s day would traditionally allow, and also increase our opportunity to truly give back to members of the nation that deserve some happiness and joy after a challenging 2 years of the pandemic.
POLARIS campaign concept became known as the “Just Because” campaign, a campaign inviting the public to nominate someone deserving of a surprise hamper simply to brighten their day.
We built a six-week activation plan that turned the nominations into a constant stream of content. Each week, new stories were shared with the media, amplified on social channels through user-generated content, and featured in targeted email updates to hampers.com customers. This kept the campaign visible, shareable and relevant throughout the Valentine’s period.
The result was a creative, emotionally-led campaign that generated media coverage, social engagement and positive brand sentiment, while delivering on the core goal of making people feel remembered and appreciated.
Press Outreach and Coverage
Our Digital PR & Outreach team outreached the campaign to the press, tailoring different aspects of the story and entrants stories to get coverage over a period of 2 weeks leading up to valentines day.
The story was successfully picked up by Reach PLC and Daily Mail and featured in over 18 regional titles. This coverage drove a total of over 2300 nominations for recipients worthy of receiving a hamper.
As this case study demonstrates, we are not just an SEO agency, we have capability as a digital PR agency too.
“This campaign was truly collaborative, with Amo Sokhi and team providing insights and direction which help us to connect our brand with new audiences, through our values. Polaris’ initial deck took us through three areas of
opportunity, linked to our Valentine’s range and the essence of our gifts.
We were particularly taken with the idea of ‘spreading love and cheer with those who need it most this
Valentine’s Day’, because it fits so well with the gift messages we see every day. ‘Just Because’ was a first for us, launching during Valentine’s month to celebrate love of all kinds – without a
need to focus on products. Seeing hampers.com in national press for this initiative was a proud moment for us
all.
We saw a different kind of engagement with our brand – from existing customers who connected more
deeply with hampers.com and our values, to brand new audiences, who discovered us through the
campaign and have since become advocates for us, via reviews and social mentions.
Amelia Fletcher, Marketing Director, Hampers.com
