Golf and travel marcomms specialist the Azalea Group has enjoyed a sparkling start to the summer with notable successes across its PR and relationship marketing platforms plus the creation of the UK’s most talked-about campaign to national club golfers.
Working to a specific brief to augment coverage of the La Manga Club’s outstanding tennis facilities, Andy Murray’s long-awaited success at Wimbledon coincided with extensive national media coverage for the luxury five-star Spanish resort, where both the new men’s singles champion and top British lady, Laura Robson, have honed their skills previously.
In the space of seven days, La Manga Club was featured in the travel section of four national UK newspapers – The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Daily Mirror and The Sunday Express – with a combined circulation of more than 2,000,000 readers. The latter feature was penned by popular BBC TV presenter and keen tennis player Angela Rippon, whom Azalea had sourced for the purpose. La Manga Club was also featured on the Daily Mail’s website, believed to be the most widely read newspaper website in the world, with 7,000,000 daily users.
Azalea’s strength in securing key brand partnerships came to the fore when it secured the five-star Donnafugata Golf Resort & Spa, in Sicily a headline role in the Strada chain of contemporary Italian restaurants’ nationwide summer menu campaign. As a result, Donnafugata will be exposed to more than 800,000 Strada customers this summer via in-restaurant point-of-sale material and embellished by substantial digital marketing and social media campaigns.
Meanwhile, the UK’s most talked-about 2013 golfing competition, the BOSS Watches H1 Club – devised by Azalea, in partnership with BOSS Watches UK, HowDidiDo Media and the Daily Telegraph – has delivered more than £160,000-worth of media coverage from its substantial PR campaign in the space of just three months, as golfers scoring a hole-in-one in club competitions are rewarded with a limited edition timepiece worth £225.
Point-of-sale material and digital output has so far reached 1.3m golf club members in more than 1,800 golf clubs in the UK and Ireland, as in excess of 800 watches were despatched to the lucky golfers in just the first three months of the campaign.
Stephen Brydon, commercial director for MGS Distribution, the official licenced UK distributor for BOSS Watches, said: “We have our own in-house marketing and PR department but I wanted Azalea because they understand golf. They absolutely got ‘it’ and understood the concept of what we were trying to achieve and without them it would not have been possible to deliver the quality of project that I was seeking.”
Sean Noble, managing director of the Azalea Group, added: “We’ve enjoyed an immensely busy and very successful first half of 2013. We are lucky to have a portfolio of outstanding clients and brands that are prepared to accept our team as an extension of their own and are open to ideas which may not have previously formed part of their strategy.
“This small sample of successful activation demonstrates the flexibility, flair and diversity we bring to our client campaigns.”
Now in its seventh year of trading, Azalea has established itself as one of Europe’s leading golf marcomms specialists, working with some of Europe’s major national and regional tourist boards as well as some of the world’s flagship golf and lifestyle resorts such as La Manga Club (Spain), Quinta do Lago, Onyria Golf Resorts and Monte da Quinta (Portugal), Donnafugata (Sicily), Brocket Hall and Exclusive Golf (UK), and world-class golf courses such as Son Gual and Alcanada, in Mallorca.
It also boasts some outstanding golf products in its client portfolio including the most in-demand technology in golf, Foresight Sports’ GC2 and HMT; golf shoe brands Kikkor and Duca del Cosma; leading Italian golfwear manufacturer Chervo; the ever popular Greg Norman Collection of golf apparel; and SwingSmart, the market-leading golf swing analyser which provides information straight to a smartphone or tablet.
Azalea www.theazaleagroup.com