Our Portfolio, Case Studies & Samples

Case Study: Public Relations Case Study

Orthodontics is the dental science and art of creating beautiful confident smiles by enhancing facial and dental harmony utilizing constantly researched, extremely small, relatively comfortable attachments onto the teeth. The South African Society of Orthodontists (SASO) is the only governing body for the orthodontics profession in South Africa.

PURE Communications was appointed to establish a communications strategy and rollout marketing and patient education programmes for SASO at the beginning of 2008.  The target audiences were varied, so within a limited budget we established teens, parents, adult patients, and the peripheral medical community such as cosmetic surgeons as the target market.

The messaging platform had to be developed from scratch since the orthodontists and dentists had never implemented a public relations programme in South Africa, and similar organisations in the US, UK, and Australia hadn’t done anything impressive.

The main messages to get out to the market were health, medical, and beauty. The successful messages were related to surgical procedures, beautiful smiles, articles about famous people or journalists who had braces as teenagers or adults, and advice articles.

We got out of the blocks with a bang, with an advice article printed in most of the community newspapers (knock-and-drop Caxtons) and the Link Pharmacy magazine, several interviews on radio, and a big article in the Business Day Health News section on adult orthodontics. More recently we succeeded in getting beautiful smile adult orthodontics articles in Longevity, O Oprah Magazine, and Cosmetic Surgery magazine.