Tea for Trump Public Relation Campaign: ROPE Theory Essay

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Research
Objective
Programming
Evaluation
Works Cited

Introduction

Tea for Trump campaign initiated by TE-A-ME Teas, a company from India, used the image of Donald Trump in their PR intervention. The company sent 6,000 bags of purifying green tea for Trump to provide him with the best tea for four years of his presidency (Tea for Trump). The campaign could be considered to be a joke, but it became viral on the Internet bringing more than three million views in about three days (Singh). The following analysis of this campaign is based on the ROPE model, which is applied to PR campaigns to assess their major components such as research, objective, programming, and evaluation (Finch).

Research

Client/organization

TE-A-ME is a part of Madhu Jayanti International Limited, a company with 70 years of experience in producing teas.
Vison: “to continuously flavor freshness in every sip of tea consumed around the world” (About Us).
Sales over ten million cups a day in 42 countries all over the world.

Opportunity/problem

To popularize drinking green tea: the company made use of the opportunity to spread the idea of their healthy and cleansing product – organic green tea. The whole tea culture is strong in the Asian region, the US.

Audiences

The analysis of audiences preceded the campaign, and India, as well as the United States, were selected to be the target ones.

Objective

Informational

To spread the power of tea on the global level. This objective involves the distribution of information about organic tea provided by Te-A-Me company to new locations, thus increasing the company sales.

Motivational

To stimulate the world to drink green tea since it has great purifying power. This objective was selected to motivate people to drink green tea and invite Donald Trump to do the same.

Reputational

The company has a good reputation all over the world due to providing high-quality organic green tea, and the campaign was planned to support this reputation among broad audiences.

Programming

Target audiences

India and the United States: the populations of these countries became target audiences for the Te-A-Me campaign because they both provide high-potential markets. India is the home country of the company, and the US was probably selected as a big multinational country worried because of the coming presidential elections.

Key message

“It is never too late to cleanse yourself” (Bulman). The key message of this campaign stimulates the audience to start cleaning themselves by drinking green tea.

Strategy

real-time marketing (it is a challenging strategy, but it proved to be effective for this campaign)
digital PR and content marketing
the critical role of the US media
creation of Content Seeding Framework to provide efficient content distribution (Singh)
development of a Crisis Communication Plan

Tactics

application of multiple platforms for the promotion
implementation of a flexible media plan
involvement of diverse social media
involvement of the public to make Trump drink tea

Timetable

the campaign started on July 14, 2016. It was planned to be executed before Republican National Convention on July 19. Although it was a challenging choice because the campaign information could get lost in the huge volume of information about Trump, the time choice was effective.

Budget

No information available.

Evaluation

The campaign managed to deliver 350 million impressions from more than 80 countries (most of which came from India and the US, the target countries) (Singh).
The success of the amplification strategy (proved by tweets analysis and monitoring).
22,000 tweets on the campaign (Naidu)
It can be concluded that the campaign achieved its goals.