Dear wee family,
dear readers,

we’re currently in the middle of successful market development for wee. Our short-term goal is to gain 100 cities and regions in Europe. Just to push forward even further from there on out. In a nutshell: millions of people will soon swear by our revolutionary cashback system and use our weeCard or weeApp for their everyday shopping. We caused a major stir with our broad-based campaign early this year. The TV commercial “Collect cash instead of loyalty points” – with the two dalmatians – was broadcast 29,000 times in nine European countries. That was huge for our brand awareness!

At the same time, we’ve been engaging in active public relations, starting with our kick-off media event on 15 December 2016 at the International Press Club in Munich. PR is a integrative component of our marketing on the on hand, and on the other hand, it’s also an independent communications discipline. Our ads communicate images and messages that we fully craft ourselves. Our PR provides media with content that they can use and publish online or offline. Unlike advertising, which we control ourselves, successful PR depends on a number of factors that are out of our hands. Due to our growing success, wee is increasingly showing up on the media’s radar. We all – and I’m speaking to you as large-scale partners and our management team in particular – need to be especially well-prepared to face all potential questions with confidence.

Believe it or not, in the past four months, there were over 400 publications on the wee cashback system, me as a founder and visionary, and our sponsorships. We worked hard for that. As part of our strategic public relations, we continually supply the media with exciting content about a wide variety of topics, which is then distributed to relevant publications by press agencies. I play a similarly important role in our public relations by always making myself available for interviews and questions by journalists. We need PR because our product and project requires some explanation: not just to increase brand awareness and accompany our sales activities, but even more so to engage in successful ‘storytelling’ about wee. Making these stories go viral in newspapers, magazines and their online versions, but also on social media such as the Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter feeds of our sales partners and customers is our declared goal.

We want to achieve brand awareness and appeal for our cashback system – and we use every trick in the PR book to make that happen. I’d like to give you a concrete example: we successfully capitalised on our boxing sponsorship in the media thanks to reports on TV, the radio, print, and online. Our return on investment was many times what we originally invested as a premium and main sponsor. At the boxing event in Erfurt, the main event of Arthur Abraham facing off against Robin Krasniqi was broadcast on German television by the ARD partner Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR). That brought in peak ratings of over two million viewers who couldn’t miss our branding in the ring. The fight was also shown in several other countries, including Armenia, Turkey, and the US, so we estimate that a total of 10 million viewers tuned in. But things get even better: the boxing event in Erfurt received a lot of coverage in the leading regional press – with articles in the BILD newspaper, the Thüringische Allgemeine, and the Thüringische Landeszeitung. That’s an additional reach of around two million. Thanks to our active public relations, including directly approaching editors and journalists, our on-site media event in the run-up to the boxing gala, and sending out press releases, we achieved around 50 publications with a seven-digit reach. And the great thing about it: while our boxing sponsorship was the occasion for publication – most outlets focused their reporting on the benefits of wee as a cashback system or the cities we’re active in. Of course, all of that only makes sense if we also make a major sales push at the same time. Erfurt was a great example for this too! We handed out thousands of charged weeCards, and our team at the arena engaged in hundreds of conversations.

Let’s keep our foot on the pedal! I’m looking forward to the successful implementation of our vision and our shared future with wee. And I’m equally grateful for and proud of the growing positive image of wee in local, regional, national, and European media.

weePower regards,

Your
Cengiz Ehliz