By Julia Moody, Director of Marketing, British Swim School

In the world of franchise marketing, forming authentic partnerships is essential for enhancing brand visibility and creating lasting connections with audiences. This summer British Swim School, the nation’s leading franchise learn to swim provider, partnered with Peppa Pig, an internationally beloved children’s character, to capture the attention of young swimmers and their families. This collaboration showcased the power of strategic alliances in driving brand awareness and delivering meaningful, family-friendly engagement.

The inspiration for the collaboration between British Swim School and Peppa Pig emerged from recognizing a shared commitment to teaching children. With Peppa Pig’s universal appeal, British Swim School saw an opportunity to introduce both water safety and the brand to a wide breadth of new families. The partnership aimed to create memorable experiences for children while increasing the brand’s visibility and credibility within local communities.

The collaboration came to life through a series of creative initiatives and campaigns that delighted young swimmers and their families. British Swim School focused on integrating Peppa Pig into key initiatives, ensuring that the partnership was an authentic extension of both brands’ values.

Sweepstakes:

To build initial excitement around the collaboration, British Swim School launched a sweepstakes offering a grand prize that included a trip to the Peppa Pig theme park in Winter Haven, FL, along with prize packs and three months of swim lessons. The promotion attracted over 13,000 families across the US and Canada, driving significant engagement on digital platforms. Along with the grand prize, five runner-up prizes were awarded, creating additional touchpoints for brand interaction. Winners were selected through a random draw and notified with personalized communication, enhancing the overall experience.

Peppa Pig Safety Week:

A highlight of the partnership was integrating Peppa Pig into British Swim School’s “Survival Week,” a week-long event held multiple times a year to emphasize the importance of survival-based swim lessons. During Survival Week, British Swim School swimmers participate in their regular swim lessons, but with their clothes on! It’s critical to teach the littlest swimmers how different the water can feel with the weight of their regular clothes, as opposed to their swimsuits. The majority of water accidents occur while children aren’t dressed to swim, and there’s a distinct difference in the weight and feeling of regular clothes in the water. While an extremely serious topic, Survival Week is a fun approach to teaching children these important water safety skills. During the rebranded “Peppa Pig Safety Week”, swim schools transformed their pool decks with British Swim School x Peppa Pig collateral, Peppa Pig decorations, and fun photo opportunities for the kids, creating a vibrant and engaging environment where children could learn vital water safety skills with their favorite character. This initiative made water safety education even more engaging and effective for young learners.

Activity Packs:
Knowing the importance of local marketing opportunities for their franchisees, British Swim School developed age-appropriate activity packs featuring Peppa Pig. These packs were distributed at preschools, community events, and through various local marketing efforts, providing valuable resources to families while reinforcing the brand’s commitment to child safety and education.

Social Media Content:
Social media played a critical role in promoting the collaboration. British Swim School used Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok to share content featuring Peppa Pig, including videos, images, and interactive posts. Hashtags such as #PeppaSplashAdventure, #BSSxPeppaCollab and #SwimWithPeppa generated buzz and encouraged user-generated content, amplifying the campaign’s reach.

Even with elements of the collaboration still ongoing, the partnership between British Swim School and Peppa Pig has had a significant impact on brand visibility and engagement with young swimmers. The partnership led to a noticeable increase in brand awareness, as evident from the over 1.2 million impressions from various advertising opportunities, over 20% increase in social media followers and over 13,000 sweepstakes entries.  

Parents and children responded positively to all elements of the collaboration, especially Peppa Pig Safety Week, with many sharing their positive experiences on social media. The initiative’s creative approach to water safety education resonated with families, leading to increased engagement rates on digital platforms.

Similarly, franchisees reported positive impacts on their businesses, noting increased interest from families and successful local marketing opportunities tied to the Peppa Pig-themed collateral, providing strong credibility when introducing the brand to prospective parents and partners for the first time.

The British Swim School and Peppa Pig collaboration offers valuable insights for future partnerships. The success of this collaboration was rooted in the seamless integration of Peppa Pig into British Swim School’s core mission. By maintaining authenticity, the partnership created a meaningful connection with the target audience, effectively incorporating British Swim School into the Peppa Pig universe.

The collaboration wasn’t just a marketing tactic but a meaningful extension of both brands’ values, helping build trust with customers and effectively introducing a new audience of young children to crucial water safety information. By staying true to their mission and creatively integrating Peppa Pig into their programs, British Swim School created a memorable experience that resonated with children and parents alike. As other franchises seek to enhance their brand and connect with target audiences, they can draw inspiration from this successful collaboration and explore similar partnerships that align with their values and objectives.

By: Jamie Izaks, President at All Points Public Relations

In the last few years, the rise of the work-from-home culture has shifted how companies and people navigate work-life balance. Bringing work into the home has led to blurred lines and increased the casual and personalization or “social media-ification” of LinkedIn.

Once a purely professional space focused on networking and job listings, LinkedIn has now evolved into a storytelling platform with a strong social media component. Its transformation can be observed across various aspects of its use: 

1. How individual users share personal content
2. How businesses are adapting strategies to reach a broader audience
3. How LinkedIn’s features and functionalities have changed to support this new, more social environment

1. The Personal Side of LinkedIn

For younger generations, like Generation Z (Gen Z), maintaining a social media presence on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok is more than just a pastime; it’s a strategic effort to build a personal brand. Often, they treat their LinkedIn profiles the same, like a storefront, showcasing themselves to potential employers as a brand would showcase a product to consumers. When Gen Z shares personal content, it is with the intent of reinforcing their carefully constructed brand identity.

Some Generation X and Millennials who have been utilizing LinkedIn before its conceptual shift, are adopting similar trends, now approaching the platform more like an extension of Facebook, sharing posts about their everyday lives and experiences. Whether these posts relate to their jobs or work-life balance, they tend to be more personal and include pictures and anecdotes from their lives. This offers an intimate glimpse into their world.

LinkedIn capitalized on that desire and crafted a longform version, introducing personal articles to the platform. Across all generations, users enjoy this medium to present themselves as multi-dimensional individuals rather than just job titles by providing deeper insights into their thoughts and opinions on various professional topics. Comments on posts across the platform have followed suit— interactions are no longer limited to professional feedback but include more personalized and conversational responses, sparking genuine discussions. This increased emotional investment and authenticity in interactions contribute significantly to LinkedIn’s evolving dynamic.

While there are different ways in which each generation interacts with this change in content, the overarching trend is clear: LinkedIn is becoming a more personal and engaging platform, blurring the lines between professional and social interactions. This is also bleeding into the ways in which brands interact with LinkedIn.

2. Building Relatable Brands

Brands are starting to follow the lead of individual users on LinkedIn, adapting to the platform’s evolving dynamics. With people spending more time on the site, treating it like other social media platforms rather than strictly for work purposes, the nature of business content has shifted. Companies now focus on longer, storytelling-driven content to engage users, incorporating more design elements, motion graphics, and videos to capture the attention of the casual scroller.

Moreover, businesses are targeting a consumer audience, promoting their products to LinkedIn users rather than solely posting job opportunities. This shift is evident in the increased interaction through comments, shares, and likes, as well as the rise of business communications such as newsletters that users can subscribe to. By engaging directly with users in this way, companies can build stronger, more personal connections with their audience.

Plus, business-to-business focused companies have evolved on LinkedIn as well. Adopting the language, tone, and colorful graphics of consumer advertisements has led to a new form of brand success on LinkedIn. This eye-catching strategy puts a twist on the tried-and-true tactics of consumer marketing for professional industries such as software sales or franchise development.

In a time when the morals and people within a company matter, the incorporation of fun consumer-focused posts helps to endear a brand to these consumers who are looking for relatability and humanity. This extends to when these companies are looking to hire as potential applicants browse their LinkedIn content to understand their culture. It is a strategic move to look desirable on all fronts.

3. How LinkedIn Has Embraced its Social Media-ification

With the platform updates we’ve seen in the past few years, LinkedIn’s goal has been clear: keep users engaged and on the platform for longer periods. LinkedIn has implemented social media tactics to accomplish this through increasing “scrollability”, opportunities for personal engagement and conversations, and even games.

Shorter attention spans are now commonplace. Social media platforms understand that their key quality is the never-ending ability to scroll, sucking users into the loop of information and entertainment it provides. While storytelling and longer posts are commonplace on LinkedIn, the added detail of a “…more” button shortens posts, allowing users to more easily move to the next thing that will grab their attention. In May 2024, they released three daily puzzle games reminiscent of the popular New York Times games. The game’s notification system reminds users to open LinkedIn every day— prompting many to stay and scroll— as well as join the conversation with other players.

LinkedIn has revamped its algorithm to prioritize content that generates more engagement, similar to how other social media platforms operate. This means that posts with high levels of interaction are more likely to be pushed to a user’s feed and reach a wider audience, encouraging users to create content that resonates with their connections.

Recognizing the growing importance of diverse formats in capturing user attention, in addition to personal articles and business newsletters, LinkedIn has invested in video content and live streaming capabilities. The introduction of LinkedIn Stories, akin to Instagram Stories, allows users to share short, ephemeral content that can highlight their day-to-day activities or professional insights in a casual and engaging way— in many ways, the content plays as if a user is talking to their connections face-to-face. 

By embracing these social media features, LinkedIn has effectively blurred the lines between professional networking and social interaction, creating a platform that is both informative and engaging. Each of these three elements— personal users, business promotion, and LinkedIn itself— have and continue to inform each other to build the social media-ified version of LinkedIn that we use today. 

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Jamie Izaks is the President of All Points Public Relations, a franchise-focused integrated PR agency based on the Chicagoland area, www.allpointspr.com.