January has arrived, its cold, wet, dark and miserable. Very few people have any money left after Christmas and worse still – it is time to go back to work! This is rarely a good retail time, full stop, but if you are an oil company, it can be even worse. January and February are the hardest of the year.

Pulse provided the vital link between BP and one of our existing clients, Virgin Balloon Flights, to invent, source, organise, implement and evaluate the largest retail forecourt prize promotion in UK history.

We knew that both Virgin and BP could benefit from a partnership as the brands ideally complimented one another.

BP seen as the very well established, traditional, risk averse, sensible and British brand – Virgin as the fun loving, exciting, fast living, youthful, vibrant and slightly irreverent one. 

What did BP want? To attract new customers to the forecourts, persuade existing visitors to come more often and increase average spend from custom full stop, whilst making as much PR noise as possible throughout the UK.

Virgin Balloon Flights in comparison were going though a very exciting period of growth, product development and sourcing new supply chains, positioning themselves towards a slightly different target market audience.

We instigated a national prize promotion campaign, involving many different parts of the Virgin group, 10,000,000 individual prizes, branding the entire forecourts of BP service stations and providing fantastic “money cannot buy” prizes including Champagne Balloon Flights, helicopter rides, and much, much more.

BP saw a significant year on year adjusted fuel volume increase, an impressive number of new customers visit their sites during the period, and an increase in average spend across the UK.

Virgin Balloon Flight sales increased by more than 25%, new retail channels were established and above all everyone had a good time organising the fantastic trips that ensued.