Case Study: Thrive
Overview
Thrive is a free personal finance management site that helps people save more, spend less, and improve their overall financial health.
How It Works
A user signs up for Thrive, for free, and syncs up their various financial accounts: checking, savings, credit cards, loans, etc. The system uses algorithmic advice to offer personalized guidance, based on transactions pulled form the user’s accounts.
PR Element
Assigned to work on Thrive while at his last agency stop, Dave ran PR efforts for Thrive from launch at a high-profile industry conference, through scale, into acquisition by LendingTree (NASDAQ: TREE), and through transition. He earned valuable coverage facing both ideal users and the business community in outlets ranging from FastCompany (a two-page spread with photo shoot) to TechCrunch to CNN to The TODAY Show. Specifically, Dave positioned to media Thrive’s behavioral psychologist as the company’s differentiator: no other competing product had a behavioral psychologist specializing in choice, judgment and decision-making in its arsenal. And the media loved it. PR efforts were able to spread into unconventional outlets and stories via “Thrive’s behavioral psychologist.” The team wasn’t limited to stories that were tied to just the product or personal finance. Instead, Thrive became a fixture in stories ranging from consumerism to human behavior - all the while reaching a larger, yet still on target, audience.
Tactical Moment - It’s a great thing when media relationships are developed to the point where the reporter simply calls the expert (in this case, our behavioral psychologist) direct on his cell. Most PR types would get all huffy that they were being squeezed out. But in actuality, there couldn’t be a nicer compliment. It means you’re doing your job the right way. Dave made (and still makes) a concerted effort to develop genuinely authentic relationships with reporters and bloggers so that when they’re pressed for time, they know where to turn.
Product Snapshot
