2013 Bronze Best use of Social Media for Brand Building

Client Gü

How did the campaign make a difference?

It identified Gü fans as having significantly above average loyalty behaviour, then used Facebook not only to recruit more fans but to generate incremental sales from those fans. A total of 58,000 fans were recruited, 35% engage with the brand every month and 75% bought a product they hadn’t tried or didn’t even know about.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry?

Gü is a small brand that has an established place on the shelves of major UK supermarkets, and is a premium brand trying to grow in a recession. With a very limited budget this campaign used Facebook and a social strategy to build an ‘always-on’ programme that increased sales not just Likes. It used the ability of social media to support a classic test and learn programme, combined with a measurement framework that measured both the value of basic Facebook engagement and the value-add it could create.

An initial analysis of Gü Facebook activity showed virality rates (Likes, comments, shares of individual posts) in the 6-7% range, far above the Facebook average of less than 2%. This suggested an extremely loyal set of fans with a genuine enthusiasm for the brand. Gü commissioned a tracking study which compared fans recruited via Facebook with a control group of consumers matched by age, employment status and claimed spend on desserts.

How did the creativity bring the strategy to life?

With social media, CRM becomes something you live, not execute. The brand shared ideas with the community, with a new post almost every day, including weekends. Learnings include: there are 11,000 foodies interested in recipes and classes; fans want Gü to make its puds seasonally relevant and give them a cultural context; product posts drive the most engagement; there’s a place for cute animals even for dessert brands; and, above all, fans want to meet the people behind the brand, especially the chef (his name’s Fred). Social means conversational, so when someone talks to you, you answer. Gü responded to every user interaction as quickly as possible and always the same day, with the simple objective of showing the same commitment to customers as they showed to the brand.

Results

The base grew from 74,000 to 132,000 while increasing engagement levels; 35% of the larger community engage with Gü every month and the most viral post achieved a 22.9% virality rate. Facebook fans spent more than the control group, fans who engaged once a week or more spent 1.32 times more than those who engaged less than once a week.