What made the Lowborn campaign such a success?

POSTED ON: 06/11/19 TAGS: Awards Guerrilla marketing lowborn

by katie

Lowborn - Kerry Hudson

Earlier this year, Sophie Painter of VINTAGE won the Best Guerrilla Marketing Award (April-June 2019) for her campaign for Kerry Hudson’s Lowdown. The judges said this was:

A stellar example of a campaign delivering on some clear objectives with a small budget and within a very short timeline. They not only conceived and delivered a campaign to support an important social justice campaign, but also made use of high profile partnerships with relevant charities to deliver a wide range of events and reach new audiences for this book.

But what did Sophie think the key elements of the campaign were? Here are her key takeaways:

  • The best campaigns are created when the author, agent, editorial, sales, publicity and marketing all agree and work towards the same goals from the outset. This was a hugely collaborative campaign based on the plans we set out to author and agent nine months ahead of publication. It’s especially important to have built this trust early on when a book is so personal to and difficult for the author.
  • In order to draw non-traditional book-buying audiences to events the key things to consider are the accessibility of the location, price and format.
  • You don’t need a huge advertising budget if you can work with large charity partners in a meaningful way, but your activity has to be led by their campaigns.
  • The personal recommendation of booksellers is central to this kind of narrative non-fiction in hardback, it can be time consuming to reach out to individual bookshops but their passion will sustain the sales once all of the publicity and marketing has run.

Related posts