catapult your business
If you're looking for the vital ingredient that's missing from the promotion of your Lakes food business, spend a while weighing up a PR consultancy that has handled some of Britain's biggest food and cookery events and competitions, promoted restaurants, pubs, big brands and artisan producers and breathed life into food-focused cluster groups.
Catapult PR has done all of this and more with huge amounts of success, having acquired a reputation for having a level of creativity 'second to none' in the words of its own clients. This creativity has underpinned campaigns that have boxed far above their budgetary weight, to alight the national, regional and local press, generate sales, increase footfall and trial and delight consumers.
To give you more food for thought, Catapult PR's managing director, Jane Hunt, has become an adopted daughter of The Lake District - Cumbria, despite her Lancastrian roots. Since founding Catapult PR in 1998, she has won 22 awards, including two prestigious Gold PR awards for a Cumbrian food festival and another two gold awards for a Cumbrian garden festival, which has a strong food theme interwoven in its fabric.
Add to this a wealth of experience in farm, rural and natural tourism, an ability to create high impact tourism product around a food theme and contacts with food writers on titles across the country and it's no wonder that so many Cumbrian food and tourism businesses are hungry to work with Catapult PR.
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About
Where, Who & How?
Catapult Public Relations is on the ground for a client wherever they conduct their tourism business in Cumbria, working on PR campaigns in the Furness Peninsula, the South Lakes, the Eden Valley, the Western Lake District and Kendal. Catapult PR can promote food festivals, food heroes, artisan producers, chefs, food events and food initiatives incorporated into mainstream tourism PR campaigns, such as food trails and cluster groups.
It also works for Cumbria's leading cookery school, generating high profile national coverage in leading broadsheets and magazines, as well as in key regional titles and on radio and TV, and has spent many an hour working with farmers who lovingly raise or rear their own farm-fresh produce.
By working with food clients beyond Cumbria's borders, in counties such as Yorkshire, County Durham, Teesside and Lancashire, Catapult has acquired a fabulous network of food contacts regionally, as well as nationally. Its ability to find food themes around which to create exciting PR activity is second to none, as the reams of press coverage in its files demonstrates!
Catapult never forgets that food and travel PR are intertwined and with so many tourism clients also on its books, the opportunities it can create are numerous and simply priceless!
Services
Catapult handles:
- Press and PR launches.
- On-going PR campaigns.
- Press trip visits.
- Press release writing and distribution.
- Copywriting for brochures, leaflets and other literature.
- Sponsorship maximisation.
- Crisis PR.
- New product development.
- Marketing and PR consultancy.
- Media liaison/media relations.
- Social media campaigns.
Catapult can work with a client
- On an on-going basis, building the brand through PR and continuous exposure.
- Through PR project work - for a special and easily defined project.
- Working in-house from clients' premises - ideal in cases where the client wishes to have their PR consultant on the spot for an allocated time-span each month.
- On specific writing briefs.
Catapult's Lakes Food PR can offer PR and promotional services for:
- Food launches.
- Food events and food festivals.
- Catering Exhibitions.
- Producers and food manufacturers with exciting food products to promote.
- Artisan food heroes.
- Chefs.
- Restaurants, pubs and other eateries.
- Hotels.
- Farm shops.
- Food festivals.
- Food sector sponsorships.
- Food trails.
Credentials
Having 22 awards wasn't enough for Catapult PR. Its extensive background in tourism PR encouraged it to go one step further than most other PR companies out there, to show a commitment to its travel and food clients. Managing Director, Jane Hunt, is one of the relatively few PR specialists to have acquired a specialist Chartered Institute of Marketing Diploma in Tourism, enabling her to present a holistic marketing picture to her clients, with the power of PR at its very heart.
She also has an A Level in Italian, so if any Lakes tourism business wishes to attract the Italian market - a sort of compare and contrast exercise between the foods of Garda and Windermere, or Como and Coniston - they know where to come!!
Success
Catapult PR's success has been built on its extreme creativity, amazing ideas, boundless enthusiasm and a passion for promoting Cumbrian businesses in an area that stretches from Maryport to Morecambe Bay and from Kirkby Stephen to Kirkby Lonsdale, and which covers all locations in between. This drives Catapult PR's campaigns, generating 'free' editorial exposure in national and regional food and travel pages, in leading women's glossies, in specialist titles for caravanners, golfers, anglers, walkers - and many more besides - and in leading lifestyle titles. Add to this the valuable radio and TV exposure that Catapult can elicit and clients receive a massive return on their investment in public relations when they turn to Catapult PR.
Ideas
Product Development & Ideas Generation
Catapult PR's input into its Lakes food PR campaigns can go much further than just publicity, with its ideas driving product development, acting as the catalyst for new events and initiatives. They also enthuse members of staff within the organisations with which the consultancy works, however big or small they may be. Catapult has suggested events, quirky PR ideas, photo-led initiatives and cluster group activities that have set the media alight, whether that is measured in terms of generating world-wide coverage on a tea theme, or having one's website making national headlines in the columns that matter and which influence target consumers.
Catapult can not only take what it is given and shape it in such a way as to appeal to the press, but also deliver a constant stream of ideas and inspiration that can lead to new avenues that have a dynamic consumer appeal. This added value is something that clients do not necessarily expect, but which provides delight each time it is delivered.
Farm Tourism & Our Food CV
Catapult PR has extensive experience in farm tourism, having handled the PR for the North West Farm Tourism Initiative for two years, launching exciting cluster groups such as The Natural Producers and Luxury in a Farm, in its own inimitable way! Add to this an incredible on-going campaign that repositioned farm tourism and a high impact initiative that made international headlines for the Tea Trail Cumbria and there is little wonder that this campaign was a runner-up for a national Chartered Institute of Public Relations Excellence Award, competing against campaigns with massive budgets, but still wowing the judges thanks to its creativity and impressive results and evaluation.
Jane Hunt's food CV stretches much further back than this, however. In her in house career, she handled all catering PR for the South Western Electricity Board, then British Gas South Western and, ultimately, British Gas HQ in London. She launched catering newsletters at each, supported all catering exhibitions, worked on initiative with chefs ranging from Keith Floyd to the Roux Brothers, and once 'minded' Raymond Blanc at the Ideal Home Show! She promoted catering sponsorships as big as Chef of the Year, the Caterbility Catering Student of the Year competition and School Cook of the Year - for which the prizes were given by Princess Diana.
She has continued the great food work with Catapult, working for a leading discount dining club for 5 years, launching various restaurants and pubs and working for food businesses as diverse as that of a cupcake queen in Canary Wharf and a Subway franchise in Lancashire.
Rest assured, Catapult PR knows how to whet the appetite of foodies through the media that they use and understands the world of the chef and the pressure-cooker environment otherwise known as the kitchen!
Our Mantra
Selling the dream
There is no substitute for passion, no greater impetus than ideas and no better magic than creating travel memories and selling the dream that underpins such memories, whether it's raving about sticky toffee pudding while watching a sunset at Arnside, or devouring some Grasmere Gingerbread while hearing the elusive cuckoo in the gardens at Rydal Mount. To Catapult, it's all about allowing the reader to smell the aroma of the breads baking as they roam Staveley Mill Yard, or feeling the salt in the air as they build up a hunger for their Cumbrian picnic by beachcombing for gems at Fleswick Bay. It's about watching your twist-dough bread bake over a forest fire, or helping to bring the cows home for milking, so that you can have farm-fresh milk on the table for breakfast.
Catapult helps its Lakes food PR clients understand why selling the dream matters and they buy into this formula with gusto - one reason why our best PR ambassadors are our Lake District clients.
FAQ
Costs
Despite all of this experience, energy and excitement, Catapult PR's fees are highly realistic, affordable and value-for-money. This affordability, combined with its fabulous results, makes its client satisfaction levels the envy of its competitors. Whatever your PR budget, Catapult PR will try to suggest a level of servicing to suit.
Where will coverage appear?
Your PR campaign should give you exposure in many different publications - many of which you could not afford to advertise in - so bear this in mind and remember what a one off advert in one publication would cost, when trying to fix a budget in your mind.
Do you have contacts within Cumbrian press?
We work with Cumbrian press on a daily basis and have great contacts on local papers, local radio and local magazines.
Are there any other advantages to using you?
Over 20 years' of PR experience speaks for itself and you will always have this on your account, rather than working with an account manager who might leave or change jobs, leaving you to start the process of getting someone up to speed on your account all over again. Our reputation is such that food and travel press come to us when they are looking for a particular piece of information.
Contact
To find out more about Catapult PR, click here... but if you love the Lakes and want to spread the word with passionate PR, fill in our contact form and let Jane Hunt come and see you to explain more. Fireworks don't have to be confined to November 5 and aspirations really can be realised if you buy PR with panache.
Contact Details:
Catapult PR
The Keep
30 Castle Avenue
Carleton
Poulton-le-Fylde
Lancashire
FY6 7NW
Telephone: 01253 891114
Mobile: 07711 628661
Email: jane@catapultpr.co.uk