Meat or no meat – Greggs’ PR is well done

Greggs announced their new Vegan Sausage Roll yesterday to widespread and mixed reaction. It certainly provided some light relief in the media from the complaints about rail fare increases – the traditional annual lightning rod for all our post-festive grumpiness.

This time last year Greggs were apologising for their 2017 Christmas campaign which saw them replace the infant Saviour in the Nativity scene with a normal sausage roll. It raised predictable hackles in religious circles and drew, at best, a mixed reaction from PR commentators. The feeling was that they were courting controversy, without being particularly creative. Even their half-hearted apology had a whiff of ‘job done’ about it.

But a year on, they’ve got more savvy. They’ve flipped the strategy on its head. Veganism seems to make some people angry – we’ve seen countless examples in the media recently. In this environment, Greggs have recognised there’s no need to stir up their own controversy. There’s a torrent of pantomime rage out there directed at people who avoid animal products so why not just tap into it?

They have used social media’s capacity to deliver scorn on demand to generate the ‘controversy’ and ensuing publicity for their product, but this time without the risk of offending on any ethical or moral grounds and remaining on the side of animal-friendly virtue. Whether this is exactly as Greggs intended the campaign is perhaps up for debate, but I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their response to Piers Morgan’s tweet suggested they had everything planned down to a T.

Either way, it definitely points to a new way of using a potentially toxic audience – the professionally scorned – that many PRs spend half their time trying to either carefully avoid or studiously ignore. Whichever side of the meat-versus-vegetarian-versus-vegan debate you sit on, I think we can all agree that from a PR perspective, this is definitely a prime cut.