As Natalie Zmuda put it in an article at Ad Age, “When Home Depot’s public-relations and marketing teams sat down to talk about how to make the retailer’s holiday marketing stand out in the social space, the discussion naturally turned to cats. ”
Enter Richad, a sarcastic orange cat featured across social media outlets commenting on seasonal topics, often through lolcats style photos, in service to a marketing and social media campaign Home Depot developed with Carrot Creative.
Richard is on Tumblr at Holiday How-to With Richard, on Twitter at @RichardtheCat, on Facebook and elsewhere. On Facebook, Richard is just part of a larger successfully entertaining approach used at the page. Richard is also partnering with Buzzfeed.
Fortunately for us, “Everyone has elves, reindeer, Santa, but one of the biggest things followed in the social space is cats,” said Trish Mueller, Home Depot’s chief marketer in the Ad Age piece. “When I shared this with our leadership team, our CEO got it immediately. We’re very lucky we have one of the hippest CEOs out there.”
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