Pillsbury's Social Media Strategy: An Analysis
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Food companies make an aggressive push to market their products around the American Thanksgiving holiday. This is a look at how Pillsbury has chosen to employ various social media platforms to engage with their audience and increase sales at this unique time of the year.
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Pillsbury's Social Media Strategy: An Analysis
- 1. ICM 501 Module 11 Gary Schroeder
- 3. We can see the images and the videos [social media users] create and comment on, monitor the conversations they are engaged in, read their blog posts and tweets, navigate their maps, listen to their track lists, and follow their trajectories in physical space. And we don’t need to ask their permission to do this, since they themselves encourage us to do by making all this data public. L. Manovich - Debates in the digital humanities, 2011. Page 478. 460; PART VI. Chapter 27
- 7. Chief Marketing Officer Mark Addicks said that about 50% of marketing executives' time at General Mills is spent creating content. [“Brand purpose”] serves as the anchor keeping General Mills brands from getting lost in the currents of the digital age. "We used to think we were great at TV," Addicks said. "We're going to have to be great at content." http://adage.com/article/special-report-digital-conference/general-mills- journey-tv-dependency-content-saavy/292420/
- 8. Pillsbury uses, over 3,000 social media sites [sic] to interact with its customers to create new ideas for product development. Blending caramel and bacon flavors, for example, came from the analysis of social interactions. http://digitalmktganalytics.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-top-way-to-find-job- today-follow.html
- 9. "When Pillsbury re-thought its purpose, we found something that was under our nose the whole time, which was that people actually make a lot of things with Pillsbury.” So the brand tweaked its focus from baking to making, "which led to a whole content stream of simple vignettes” […] such as a video for Pillsbury Grands Unsloppy Joes -- with the meat wrapped in the dough before cooking. That video inspired consumer riffs such as Grands wrapping shrimp and pesto that fueled thousands of posts. http://adage.com/article/special-report-digital-conference/general-mills- journey-tv-dependency-content-saavy/292420/
- 10. General Mills [Pillsbury’s parent co.] learned through customer conversations that families were playing with the Pillsbury dough, making shapes and designs for fun; not just cooking with it. Based on this insight, General Mills revitalized a tired brand by focusing on the family activity value the product enables. http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/what-brands-can-learn-from-customer- conversations-on-social-media/623872
- 13. Social Media Platforms Platform Engagement* Facebook 3,278,043 likes Facebook (Pillsbury Baking) 717,359 likes Twitter 132,000 followers; 1,480 likes Instagram 31,700 followers Instagram (Pillsbury Baking) 11,000 followers Pinterest 188,500 followers; 234 likes; 8,305 pins Pinterest (Pillsbury Baking) 16,700 followers; 941 likes; 2,498 pins YouTube 25,784 subscribers * Engagement statistics as of November 15, 2015
- 21. Pillsbury has done such a great job with its mascot that it has transitioned into pop culture. The Pillsbury Doughboy has made appearances on The Simpsons, South Park, Glee, and The Big Bang Theory. He even appeared in a GEICO commercial. https://www.stickybranding.com/a-brand-to-love-brand-mascots-tug-your- heartstrings/
- 25. Social Media Platforms Platform Engagement* Facebook 3,278,043 likes Facebook (Pillsbury Baking) 717,359 likes Twitter 132,000 followers; 1,480 likes Instagram 31,700 followers Instagram (Pillsbury Baking) 11,000 followers Pinterest 188,500 followers; 234 likes; 8,305 pins Pinterest (Pillsbury Baking) 16,700 followers; 941 likes; 2,498 pins YouTube 25,784 subscribers * Engagement statistics as of November 15, 2015
- 26. Mascots Generate More Social Media Buzz With the Pillsbury Doughboy, there is no way to separate the Doughboy from the name of the brand he sells. Research confirms that mascots are the way to go online: they are popular, have no competing agendas and they work for free. http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/mascots-generate-more-social-media- buzz-for-brands-than-celebrities-study-reveals/130185
- 27. Working with a brand mascot means playing the long game. You’re deliberately incorporating the mascot into your brand strategy and drawing on it again and again. The more you can connect the mascot with your desired brand attributes, the better. https://www.stickybranding.com/a-brand-to-love-brand-mascots-tug-your- heartstrings/
- 36. Anniversary Buzz Volume Effort Engagement* Nov. 2 FB invitation to “poke” Doughboy 832 likes; 231 shares Poke website to release video 10,816 ”pokes” YouTube Doughboy dance video 6,999 views Nov. 7 FB invitation to watch dance video 449,000 views; 12,000 likes; 928 comments; 6,100 shares Today show Doughboy appearance tweet 111 RTs; 290 likes * Engagement statistics as of November 15, 2015
Editor's Notes
- Let’
- This module’s assignment is to look at Big Data and social media as it might apply to the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. First, let’s talk for a moment about what Big Data can tell us generally.
- This is from our readings this week. And the key point in this quote is that marketers no longer need to do nearly as much market research on their potential customers, because the customer puts so much information about their interests and consumption habits in the public domain online. One of the things that we all volunteer (even though we don’t think about it much) is our search history through Google. Google conveniently exposes some of this data to us through their Zeitgeist product.
- This is a simple example of Big Data—what you might call a mundane or trivial example in that it tells us exactly what we would already suspect: people take to the internet to learn how to cook turkeys in November.
- This module’s assignment is to look at Big Data and social media as it might apply to the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. First, let’s talk for a moment about what Big Data can tell us generally.
- For this analysis, I’m going to look at Pillsbury, a company that tries to take advantage of the Thanksgiving holiday to sell its food products. PILLSBURY makes biscuits, cookies, pie crust, breads, crescent dough, pizza crust, breakfast food, cinnamon rolls, gluten-free products.
- This quote from General Mills’ Chief Marketing Officer shows you that they realize that the days when they could use TV ads as their primary means of promoting their products is over. They know that they have to consistently feed their social media channels with content produced specifically for that medium.
- I don’t know what the author meant when they said that Pillsbury uses over 3,000 social media sites, but the point is that this shows how they created a new product based on feedback they got through social media. They learned that customers were suing their products in an unexpected way and were able to adjust their product as a result.
- This quote tells us that an offbeat video for combining sloppy joe meat and Pillsbury’s doughs resulted in customers making their own sort of mash-up videos and posting them online. Their marketing exceutive is embracing consumer-generated content as a means of creating enthusiasm around his products and increasing sales.
- This quote is another example of the same phenomenon in which feedback from social media informed the companies thinking about how to market its product. Here they found that people weren’t simply cooking with their product, they were playing with it to get kids involved.
- Let’s take a look at their online profile. Their website is clearly positioning itself for the Thanksgiving holiday.
- If we look at the main navigation of the website, we can see that of the six main categories, one is devoted entirely to Holidays and associated recipes. Also, on the website, Pillsbury makes it easy to discover all of their social media channels. All of the usual suspects.
- I want to note here that Pillsbury has two main social media identities: Pillsbury and Pillsbury Baking. Pillsbury baking has a much smaller engagement profile that Pillsbury as a whole, so I’m going to focus on them and not on the baking group.
- These are posts that are typical of Pillsbury’s facebook feed…primarily recipes. And you can see that they’re fairly well received. The “likes” are around 1,000 and the shares are at least 700. I also note that they do a good job of tying all of their social media properties together. At the top you’ll notice a link back to their website that contains the recipe details and they also connect it to Pinterest so that their fans can share the content that way to a different (or overlapping) audience.
- Here’s their Twitter account.
- …and their YouTube account.
- Their Pinterest page
- And here’s the Pillsbury Baking Pinterest page.
- Before I go any further, I want to mention this familiar character, the Pillsbury Doughboy. And this is a quote that indicates just how well-known and identifiable this brand mascot is.
- And I introduce that because he’s going to come up in the next social media platform, Instagram.
- Here’s a typical Pillsbury Pinterest post featuring the Doughboy. You can see that it has 487 likes and 25 comments.
- It links to this still in which Pillsbury announces that tomorrow is the Doughboy’s 50th anniversary. You can see that there are a number of warm, favorable comments posted in response.
- So let’s review their overall social media stance and followership of Pillsbury.
- Why does Pillsbury stick with its 50-year old mascot? One reason is that they know that mascots are more effective in generating buzz on social media that paid celebrities. A recent study publicized in Ad Week addressed this phenomenon.
- Another reason they stick with this character is that Pillsbury seems to appreciate the sort of “long game” that this quote refers to. There’s a lot of nostaligia for the Doughboy and we’ll see some of that coming up next.
- Here’s our mascot appearing in an event that is inextricably attached to Thnksgiving: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. A Doughboy balloon was first introduced to the Parade just a few years ago in 2009. This is a screen captures from General Mills’ own blog. http://www.blog.generalmills.com/2015/11/the-doughboy-is-50/
- Here’s another view of the Doughboy making his way along the parade route. This picture was shared via Pillsbury’s Twitter account.
- For an example of a particularly successful social media post for this brand, I’m going to review the Pillsbury Doughboy’s 50th anniversary that just happened earlier this month. As I mentioned, General Mills and Pillsbury have had tremendous success with the Doughboy; it’s a beloved product mascot in the U.S. He routinely comes up in advertising surveys as being one of the top product mascots of all time.
- To capitalize on this, General Mills launched a social media blitz that also included promotion on traditional television media via NBC’s Today Show. Here’s a screen capture showing some earned media exposure on the Today show’s own Twitter account.
- Here’s a post from Pillsbury’s Facebook account on November 2 encouraging followers to go to a website that allows them to “poke” the Doughboy and help unlock a video of the character dancing to celebrate his anniversary, This takes advantage of the famous decades-long campaign in which people gently poke the character’s stomach.
- I followed that link, added my poke and was taken to the video which had already been unlocked 800 pokes before I got there. It’s kind of a clever way to get people to share the content…if there are people out there who are really desperate to see this sort of thing.
- If one looks at Pillsbury’s YouTube channel directly, this is what they’ll see. Note the view count.
- This is a second post to their Facebook account. This one occurred on November 7 after the video had been unlocked. Note the interaction stats. Much higher than the earlier November 2 post.
- As with previous assignments in which we’ve been asked to evaluate a campaign’s success, it’s important to define what “success” means. The end goal of a company’s social media campaign that’s centered around products is either reputation control or increasing sales. Since we don’t have access to sales statistics, we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with evaluating success in terms of social media interactions—or “buzz volume”—including visits, views, mentions, followers and subscribers; and secondary level measures such as shares, replies, clicks, re-tweets, and comments. So, to wrap up the objective data on this anniversary campaign, here’s a chart of the results. Certain elements of the campaign were more impressive than others. The engagement numbers seen on Pillsbury’s Facebook account for the November 2 invitation to poke the Doughboy were underwhelming for a widely known brand with national reach; 832 likes and 231 shares is far short of anything viral. Likewise, the number of hits on the “poke” website and the YouTube channel which hosts the dance video (only 7,000 views). The social media pickup surrounding the Doughboy’s appearance on the Today show was pretty good by Twitter standards with 111 re-tweets and 290 likes. But the real head turner in this campaign was the Facebook performance of the November 7 invitation to watch the unlocked dance video: almost half a million views, 12,000 likes, 928 comments and over 6,000 shares. It doesn’t get much better than that for a food brand on Facebook.
- The Twitter and Facebook comments show some intangibles about customer attitudes that data alone can’t. Namely, there’s a national affection for this brand that centers around two things: first, nostalgia; this is a brand that middle aged Americans have known since they were children. Second, everybody loves the Doughboy. I’ve rarely seen such open warmth for a corporate mascot. These comments show that people regard him as an actual character that they can talk to. Notice how many of the comments speak directly to the character (“I love you, Doughboy.”)
- How can Pillsbury succeed with its products on social media? By continuing to follow its already established approach: as I’ve shown, General Mills knows that it has success with its Pillsbury brand when they listen to how their customers are using the product. Rather than selling them what they think should be done with the product, they’re encouraging customers to share their own recipe ideas on social media…particularly Pinterest They know that they have to eschew traditional advertising alone in favor of producing content specifically intended to feed their online channels. In the future, they can look for influencers within the communities that grow around their products; they can try to harness the energy of those influencers in a way that advantages their brand. We know from past modules that