Case Study — PlayPower
Building an Earned Media Strategy That Scales Across PlayPower’s Growing Brand Family
How CSG grew earned coverage across seven of PlayPower’s playground, shade structure and outdoor infrastructure brands through a portfolio-wide earned media strategy.
Communications Strategy Group (CSG®) is a PR and marketing agency with expertise in building differentiated media strategies for multi-brand organizations.
See what we did for PlayPower
36+
media hits secured over one year
27
published bylines
50M+
reach of published content
Opportunity
A Growing Portfolio Needed an Earned Strategy Built for Each Brand
As PlayPower’s portfolio grew, telling a clear story for each brand became a bigger challenge, since every brand had built its own products, customers and reputation while still needing to feel connected to the larger PlayPower story.
PlayPower came to CSG looking for a media relations partner who could raise visibility for the parent company while giving individual brands room to shine in the trade and industry publications their audiences read. Those publications covered playgrounds, shade structures, recreation management and outdoor infrastructure, each with its own specialized editors and place in that landscape.
Several brands within the portfolio served comparable customers with similar products and business goals, which meant CSG had to navigate the real risk of media fatigue and competing storylines from the outset.
Multiple PlayPower brands could easily end up competing against each other for the same coverage opportunities, making brand-specific strategy essential from day one.
solution
A Coordinated Program Built Around Every Brand’s Own Story
CSG treated every PlayPower brand as its own client with its own story, all running under one coordinated strategy. Drawing on our experience in B2B and trade media relations, we assessed the audience and market position of each brand individually, then built an approach around four core workstreams.
1. Brand-Specific Messaging
We built customized messaging frameworks for each brand, aligning every pitch with that brand’s own objectives and its place in the broader industry conversation.
2. Distinct Pitch Angles
We developed separate angles built around product innovation, market trends, thought leadership and customer impact, giving every brand its own genuine reason to be part of the conversation.
3. Precise Media Targeting
We built relationships with the trade media best suited to each brand’s target audience, then hyper-targeted individual story angles to a subset of those outlets, carefully balancing overlap between brands competing for similar coverage.
4. Trend and Seasonal Timing
We connected each brand’s work to larger shifts in consumer behavior and industry trends, and paired that with forward-looking pitching that accounted for how far in advance trade editors plan their content.
Visual and behind-the-scenes storylines opened doors to regional coverage. Stories emphasizing public impact, safety, resilience and community benefit consistently performed best, giving CSG a clear playbook as the program expanded to new brands.
impact
Consistent Coverage Across a Growing Portfolio of Brands
In one year of the partnership, CSG secured 36+ media hits for PlayPower, reaching more than 50 million people through published content across trade and top-tier consumer outlets including Newsweek. That coverage has told a range of brand stories, including:
An inclusive playground opening, covered through Little Tikes Commercial
A Vehicle Protection Structures (VPS) shade and solar panel project protecting a Kia manufacturing plant in Georgia
VPS curbside canopy installations for Whole Foods Market
A standout indoor attraction feature for Soft Play
The program’s success gave PlayPower the confidence to expand it further, growing the number of sub-brands in CSG’s media relations program from four to seven, including the parent brand, as leadership saw the value the coordinated, brand-by-brand approach was building across its portfolio.
Why This Work Matters
A brand portfolio grows fastest when every brand gets room to tell its own story. One coordinated program built on differentiated brand strategies builds trust that grows over time.
That approach let each PlayPower brand build its own story with its own audience, while CSG’s coordinated strategy behind the scenes kept those stories reinforcing each other across the portfolio.
This work reflects CSG’s approach to representing multi-brand organizations, building strategies precise enough to serve each brand while strong enough to support the growth of the portfolio as a whole.
