Friday, July 25, 2014

Let's drink to George's birthday with some Tetley Tea.


In honor of Prince George's first birthday, Tetley Tea offered a coupon for a free box of their British Blend to all US residents who have "George" somewhere in their legal name and who posted a baby photo of themselves on Tetley's Facebook page on July 22. (Lukovitz, 2014)

The 24 hour giveaway was promoted that day only on Facebook and Twitter.  The results?  A 543% increase in posts engagement.  Which just goes to show that no one can resist a cute baby picture.

But, as Tetley marketing executive Marc Birnbaum points out, the promotion is a way of reminding people that Tetley Tea is the quintessential British tea.

So what do you think of this approach?  Is this promotion a good fit?  Does it make you want to buy Tetley tea?


Lukovitz, K. (2014, July 24)  Tetley Continues To Score With Royal Social Promos.  mediapost.com.  Retrieved July 25, 2014, from


3 comments:

erinwho? said...

As a tea drinker, I was excited to find out more about the campaign. The promotion is a good fit as Prince George is just adorable. It might not make you run to the stores right now to get a box but it will help you in recalling the brand when you're in stores in front of hundreds of different tea.

However much to my disappointment, I also found out about the slavery investigations of Tetley Assam tea when I did a search on Google just for their Facebook page.

Is this campaign trying to stop the Indian slave trade negative buzz on social media?

Tom Emmons said...

I am intrigued by the fact that the promotion applied exclusively to residents of the United States. The overwhelming audience interaction in response to this promotion illustrates that Tetley Tea's self-proclaimed status as "the quintessential British tea" lends a very tangible appeal to the product with American consumers. Perhaps a sentiment exists within the greater United States audience that tea from the UK is somehow more sophisticated? American imperialism has, for the most part, given way to a pervading support for products with local origins, which is why so many products are marketed as being quintessentially "American" (a myriad of marketing strategies, even those that don't explicitly say as much, can be boiled down to the product's inherent "Americanness"). It is always intriguing to see a product whose superiority is asserted on the grounds of its foreign origins.

Anonymous said...

In my opinion, Tetley tea made a brilliant promotion. People always share baby pictures. The company just gave them a good reason to share a baby picture, a free box of their British Blend.
The company reached the target audience and they made people drink their tea. Also, when the company was doing this they used a little British prince which is one of the effective way to remind people Tetley tea is the quintessential British tea.
From my point of view, the promotion is successful. However, it doesn't make me want to buy Tetley tea, because i'm not the target audience. I came from
a different country and our tea culture is completely different from Americans'.

Orkun Altinoz