Porridge - The Best Breakfast Choice. Would You Agree?

With these cold winter mornings slowly but surely approaching, there's nothing like a good  bowl of porridge to prepare me for my day. I find it really important to make sure that I have breakfast everyday, particularly when I have a long day of uni ahead of me.

For one of my uni assignments I had to look into an award scheme that takes place every year called the CIPR PRide awards. The campaign that I focused on was "Flahavans: Back to porridge!" and it won a Gold Award for consumer relations in Northern Ireland, in 2009.

Without rambling on(i'll try not to anyway!), i'll give you a brief outline of the campaign and what it achieved:

• The aim of the campaign was to raise awareness about how important it is for people to start their day off in a healthy way, and ultimately by eating Flahavan's porridge (Flahavan's is Irelands number 1 oat miller by the way!)
• There were three main platforms that the campaign based itself around. 1. "Flahavans for your well-being" (emphasizing it's health benefits), 2. "Flahavans boosts productivity" (it encourages brainpower and concentration), and 3. "Flahavans is versatile" (it comes in a range of flavors, and allows for many recipes).
• Morrow Communications was the chosen PR company to work with the campaign, and they raised awareness through a handful of tactical actions. Their tactics involved a variety of consumer research where they found out what the main causes of stress were and how these affected their daily routine, for example, if you had breakfast did it mean you were less stressed? They discovered that porridge was in fact the most effective breakfast choice and caused the least amount of stress! A partnership was also formed with Northern Ireland Heart & Stroke Charity where they raised awareness about the importance of porridge and oat-products in your diet, as well as informing people about the major heart and health risks that can occur if you are not eating a healthy diet. They also conducted a "Business Breakfast Challenge" to target those in a business environment, which hoped to result in reducing work place stress. 

The campaign succeeded and raised a lot of talk about healthy diets and how important this issue is. It also encouraged talk about other increasing issues such as obesity and productivity. The campaign gained a lot of press and radio coverage as well as raising a PR value of £137,000, and reaching over 5000 consumers, which proves that what they were doing was effective. 

After discussing the campaign with a group of my classmates it was really interesting to learn the eating habits that some of them possess, and how it affects their daily routines. After asking people what they normally eat for breakfast, I got a few of the normal expected answers such as toast, cereal, fruit, eggs..... all of which, by the way, were claimed to not fill you up enough before lunch time and therefore these people usually result to snacking in the morning. However there were also a few "breakfast foods" which I personally would never have thought of having for breakfast such as sandwiches, and even meat! But it was said that these foods fill you up enough to not want to eat for a while after. 

So what is the right balance? From my research it is clear that porridge is a healthy and filling breakfast choice, but how many of us actually eat it on a regular basis? 

What do you normally have for your breakfast? Does it fill you up? Do you want to snack before lunch? I would be really interested to know how important you think it is to have a healthy breakfast, and if you don't currently eat a healthier breakfast choice, do you think it would make your day any different if you did?

What do you think makes a campaign effective, and do you think that this campaign deserved its gold award and general recognition for what it achieved? Is there anything you can think of that would help raise even more awareness for current health issues?