A day dedicated to all things wonderfully vegan. A big day for us (have you seen how many plant-based clients we have?) but what does it mean to everyone outside the PR and vegan bubble? We challenged Rachael, our account assistant to give it some thought.

Awareness days = an excuse to celebrate?

As a Suffolk-based PR agency, we are never too far away from a Suffolk Day post; we can’t help it, we love to celebrate and an awareness day gives us every reason to. Just last month we had EEEGR Wind Week and Chocolate Week – a personal favourite amongst the team – but there are of course awareness days for almost everything. Today marks World Vegan Day, arguably second only to Veganuary in important moments for our plant-based clients. But how useful are awareness days?

Jumping on trends is always helpful to boost engagement on social media, and it can work the same way with awareness days. It allows us to connect our clients content with topics that align with their brand. World Car Free Day is a great talking moment for sustainability focused clients. And we’re not going to let International Beer Day pass our breweries by.

For Pier, it’s the same. You’ll see us talking about moments such as International Women’s Day and World Mental Health Day as these are topics that mean a great deal to us and are part of our company DNA. Work behind the scenes at the heart of Pier’s culture will always be more important and prolific than a blog or a social media post, but we’ll of course want to pivot publicly on these moments.

However, the days of some of the more frivolous awareness days having the weight they once did with the wider media seem to have gone. Remember Talk Like a Pirate Day anyone? We know audiences crave meaning and if an awareness day doesn’t have a purpose, it won’t have impact.

The magic formula seems to me to be authenticity (does anyone actually care about this) + relevancy = success. And that’s why we’ll continue to champion ‘days’… but only the ones that fit.

Rachael Butler