Fuelling Change: Helping WP Group Customers Navigate the Red Diesel Rebate Change

Helping WP Group inform customers about changes to Red Diesel

WP Group is an innovative fuels distribution company headquartered in Southampton. It provides fuel products and solutions to a range of different specialist sectors, from construction sites and ports to marinas and data centres.

Fuelling Change is the mantra WP Group follows to ensure that it is doing everything it can to be restless in its quest to drive efficiencies through the business and for its customers.

Last year, a big change occurred in the fuels industry. On the 1st of April 2022, the Red Diesel Rebate was removed for most sectors in the UK.

For many businesses, the change meant an increase in fuel costs, but it also raised many questions when it came to old stock. Do you remove it? Do you need to clean your tanks? Can you keep purchasing gasoil until 31st March?

WP Group approached Carswell Gould to come up with an awareness campaign to inform customers about the change that was occurring and to encourage them to act before the April deadline.

Our Approach

WP Group had a duty of care to its customers to be proactive in warning them about the change and supporting them through the transition. The messaging and visual approach of the campaign therefore needed to be clear and impactful.

It was offering free guidance and support to help businesses unpick and understand the impending legislation change, and advise them on the expectations, requirements, and next steps.

The motif was a badge, which had the deadline date emblazoned in its centre and used bold fonts and a two-tone red and white colourway. Red was chosen to connect the badge to red diesel and serve as a warning that action needed to be taken.

For the campaign assets, we created an informative landing page that was loaded with information about the change. It also provided links to proactive solutions linked to the change (such as alternative fuels and ways to prevent fuel theft).

Finally, the page included a contact form for people to fill out if they had any questions about the rebate change and needed further advice and support.

To draw people to the page, we created a suite of digital assets. These included HTML emails and social media graphics, to banners for the WP Group homepage (such was the importance of getting the message seen).

We also created a series of Google Search and Display ads to push the message outside of WP Group’s usual orbit.

The outcome

The Red Diesel Switch campaign succeeded in achieving its goal to help educate and inform WP Group’s customers about an industry-wide change that would have a big impact on their businesses. It also won the Hermes Creative Gold 2022 award for integrated marketing campaign.

“We were delighted with the concept that Carswell Gould presented for our Red Diesel Switch campaign. It was a critical campaign for us that was important to get right. The team worked incredibly hard to turn it around within a short timeframe and provide us with all the assets we needed to get the message far and wide. The icing on the cake was seeing it go on to win an award.”

Mark Clouter, Commercial Manager, WP Group

Examples of Google Ads made for the Red Diesel Campaign

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