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community building

The top things that have mattered to us in January

The top things that have mattered to us in January

We’re back with our monthly roundup of campaigns, content and activations that we feel are making a difference to our world…

  1. Hiyacar’s back to life

Hiyacar are in an exciting position as a high-growth spearheading a new sector of the car sharing market. And up until this point, they’ve been having to subsidise the majority of peer to peer insurance costs for drivers as that’s the sector norm. But when their insurance provider came back in late December with further increases to pricing for their drivers and no further changes to the claim policy -  they took the decision to cease trading for a couple of months. 

They’re happy to announce that they fully restored their service as of this week, but we wanted to reflect on how awesome their customer service was during this period of closure. They went out of their way to speak to each driver and owner in their community to personally explain the issue - and to people who couldn’t rent during this period, they gave them 50% of the funds it would have cost to rent a replacement with competitors service providers. 

It couldn’t have been easy, but they went above and beyond for their community, proving their mettle as a company which is not prepared to ‘grow at all costs’. Rob Larmour, their COO & Co-founder told Team Mattr that “the response we received from our members and from other companies who saw not only what we did by making a stand but how we handled the aftermath for our drivers and owners, has been fantastic. Being open and allowing everyone to see what goes on behind the scenes showed that we won't compromise our values for growth.”

2. Friends of the Earth’s newest campaign tackling eco-anxiety 


Eco-anxiety is a bit of a hot topic right now and this brilliant film for Friends of the Earth created by Don’t Panic is an awesome way to bring the conversation to life. We’ve been hugely inspired by this approach to raising awareness.

By sensationalising the heroine’s chase to win her plastic bottle back, Friends of the Earth have figured out how to communicate and tackle the topic of doing your bit for the planet without being preachy. With so many stats flying about on how many years we’ve got left and how much work is still left to be done, it’s easy to get caught up -  but take a leaf from this ad and start doing your own bit to help.

3. First Direct ‘money wellness’ TTL campaign & social content series

We believe money is a wellness issue. Let's challenge how money makes us feel. #moneywellness

22 Likes, 1 Comments - first direct (@firstdirect) on Instagram: "We believe money is a wellness issue. Let's challenge how money makes us feel. #moneywellness"

We’ve seen some great ads over the years that focus on the difficulty of talking about money openly and confidently, like ‘The M Word’ by Lloyds Bank. Now First Direct have come out with their latest campaign looking at the concept of ‘money wellness’ in our everyday realities. 

To accompany their OOH billboard ads, they’ve also produced a new social video content series interviewing their existing customers and how they are trying to be more ‘money healthy’. 

It’s great to see the huge highstreet finance players take part in an unscripted conversation around financial pressure, a trend that has definitely not been appreciated before. We’re huge advocates for brands leaning on their real people to tell real stories, so adding new perspective to the ways in which we’re improving our health in our lives is incredibly impactful.


4. Hubbub’s coffee cup installation exposes just how much waste coffee cups produce

We’re all guilty of using coffee cups without realistically considering if they’re going to have a second life. To combat this behavioural habit, environmental charity Hubbub have created an installation to showcase the 5,555 cups used per minute in the UK - compared to the 222 of those that are actually recycled in the existing processes. 

Natasha Gammell, the project lead at Hubbub, told us that “at 3 metres tall and illuminated at night, the structure is unmissable, swallowing visitors up in thousands of geometrical cups. The installation has evolved into a fully interactive public artwork as the thousands of people who pass the installation each day write down their visions for a greener world on the cups.”

Hubbub and Starbucks have contributed over £300K to creating new recycling centres across different boroughs that will uniquely process coffee cups, exploring new ways of regenerating the used plastic. We loved the idea for such an aesthetic visual to raise awareness for such a widespread issue - and there’s immense possibilities to create new and impactful content around the outcome. Watch this space!

Liked what you’re reading and want to create content that matters?

Get in touch at josh@mattr.media

BBB tips: working on communications between teams, when to consider a re-brand, and how to create a genuinely engaged community

BBB tips: working on communications between teams, when to consider a re-brand, and how to create a genuinely engaged community

We’re back from another great instalment of Brand, Bitch & Brekkie, with plenty of fresh insights to share from the real-world challenges our community of purpose-led brands find themselves in.

Changing the mindset internally towards to your marketing team


We’ve touched on this briefly before in previous roundtables, but there is no one-size-fits-all answer to helping your internal teams work more efficiently together. But what we have noticed is that the usual tension lies between how each team is perceived in terms of the value they add (explored further in “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni).

An interesting method to resolving this, for one particular brand, was to have the marketing team sit in on sales meetings and vice versa. This helped ensure an understanding of what types of collateral were integral to guarantee sales and the loyalty of customers, and essentially drew a line in the sand to what shouldn’t be changed or branded as ‘not on brand’ - making sure all voices are heard.

Understanding the red flags that can help identify if you need to consider a re-brand



When you’re starting a business and your team is small, everyone knows each other, your brand and its values so intimately. But naturally, as you grow, new faces join the team and many of them won’t really know who you are or what you really stand for.

Several guests shared their experiences of why this was a problem: 

  1. “If it’s not resonating with us, how are our customers going to understand it?” 

  2. “I sat down with 10 different people, and nobody could tell me what we actually do” -

  3. “OK they say, I get it you’re purpose-driven, but now what?” 

For a lot of the people around the table, it became necessary to go through a rebrand process with the aim of ensuring their values, tone of voice and general ways of working matched up with the vision they had for the company...interestingly the most successful of these processes was done extremely collaboratively with the whole team and became the benchmark to plan all communications out of.


Taking the steps to build a genuine community


Creating a genuinely engaged and involved community is something that many brands struggle with. It’s a tricky field to navigate and execute properly - as engaging each of your users/customers face-to-face is a big leap. But luckily, we had some fairly experienced guests round the table who could spill secrets on their success...

A great example of this from one of our guests round the table was through a closed Facebook community - but they take care to make sure the channel isn’t a free for all. The brand’s marketing team are admins, and the only ones who can post, but their audience can like and comment to their heart‘s content. These parameters essentially protect their digital community space from becoming another customer service channel, and also cultivate a very authentic channel to communicate to their community, when organising face to face meetings is next to impossible. 

Another brand told us of how they host monthly pub sessions for their brand ambassadors.  This brand prides itself on the fact that the ambassador roles are volunteered by their community, so as a reward and a way of getting insight to their guerrilla outreach, what could be better than going to the pub? They recommended this method as a way to boost your company culture and exchanging ideas straight from the eyes and ears of your brand’s community.


Be open about sharing everything, even if you think it isn’t a big deal 

But having the foundations for building a community isn’t enough - and one guest fought this argument with a pretty great idea. 

Using the digital medium above, they’ve actually benefited from their community being directly involved in their business decisions. As an example, they’ve collaborated on working files of brand guidelines and tone of voice documents, product initiatives and web designs, even down to the design and layout of a button on their app because of free flowing feedback. 

It’s been an adjustment to create an additional feedback round in all these processes, but it’s led to a huge amount of brand loyalty and investment in their brand. It’s a lesson to us all to be open about allowing your community to help make decisions that you might not consider important or be able to resolve internally.

AND we host a great roundtable breakfast for our community of purpose-led brand marketers: they’re small, intimate and exclusive - and works a treat to see your beautiful faces.

We’ve got our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie on Feb 11th, and there’s a couple of tickets left. 

Book yourself in here OR email sunnii@mattr.media to find out more!