Dr Pepper's Social Media Explosion
Following its 1904 debut at the St. Louis World’s Fair, Dr Pepper’s unique flavor was an instant hit with consumers and quickly grew to be one of America’s biggest refreshment treats. More than 100 years later, fans of the Dr Pepper Snapple Group’s (www.drpeppersnapplegroup.com) flagship brand remain extremely passionate, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at Dr Pepper’s Facebook page, where Advertising and Marketing dictated what they thought fans wanted to hear. The problem with that approach was that fans simply weren’t excited about the promotion-heavy content. The audience wasn’t passionate; it wasn’t even engaged.
With Facebook growing rapidly as a powerful consumer touchpoint, Dr Pepper needed to act fast to reignite fan passions on Facebook and, in turn, drive more consumers to the page and into stores to buy its products.
“Above all else, we want to champion this unique brand passion on Facebook and elevate the belief that we are a one-of-a-kind brand for one-of-a-kind people,” says Shaun Nichols, vice president of Integrated Content Marketing, Dr Pepper Snapple Group.
Shaking Things Up
In 2010, Dr Pepper partnered with Code and Theory (www.codeandtheory.com), one of the largest independently owned and creatively led agencies in the United States, to revamp Dr Pepper’s social program. What happened next was nothing short of miraculous. In just 15 months, Dr Pepper’s Facebook fan count skyrocketed from one million to 10 million.
How did they do it?
They found a new voice for the beloved brand: “For Peppers, by Peppers”. By listening to its audience members, Dr Pepper was able to understand why they love the brand. This step was invaluable in determining what social media content to build upon and amplify these consumer habits.
“Every brand has its loyalists. However, Dr Pepper’s show a passion for the brand unlike any other. They live and breathe Dr Pepper,” explains Nichols. “By honing in on this key group of die-hard fanatics and creating content for them in particular, we were able to push engagement further, build brand advocacy and convert our casual consumers into engaged super fans.”
At the same time, Dr Pepper and Code and Theory discovered that heavy digital users made a large portion of the Dr Pepper audience. These are the type of fans who are active Reddit users, digital-savvy blog readers and plugged-in millennials who naturally navigate all corridors of the digital underground.
“We established our credibility with them by putting a one-of-a-kind Dr Pepper spin on Internet trends in real time as those trends were happening, and seeded it into our ongoing content,” says Steve Baer, managing partner, Code and Theory.
Lastly, in order to keep content on the edge of conversation, Dr Pepper developed a brand newsroom wherein employees from all different disciplines sift through trends and learnings gleaned from data platforms, like Oracle Social Cloud (www.oracle.com/social) for social listening, social analytics and social publishing. Oracle Social has deep listening, global reach, a unified social media management platform, and integrations with Customer Experience (CX) applications. Therein, Dr Pepper could spot opportunities for inserting the brand into the most relevant conversations.
“We all contribute to an internal Facebook group, where we share ideas and insights throughout the day. In-person meetings throughout the week also help us to revisit each brand’s larger purpose, persona and story — an invaluable exercise in helping each brand stay relevant and remain flexible,” says Baer.
The Ripple Effect
By listening to what its audience is saying, and delivering messaging that builds upon that insight, Dr Pepper’s social media following grew from one million to 10 million Facebook fans in just 15 months (the brand has acquired more than 16 million Facebook fans to date).
Code and Theory also helped Dr Pepper increase fan engagement 64 percent from 2011 to 2012, and another 46 percent from 2012 to 2013. What’s more, a recent study by Datalogix (www.datalogix.com) showed that after someone becomes a fan of Dr Pepper on Facebook, he or she takes 35 percent more trips to the store to buy Dr Pepper.
These results prompted Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) to award Dr Pepper first place in the Social Relationship category of the prestigious Groundswell Awards competition, which honors excellence in the effective use of social media to advance a business goal.
Beyond Facebook
Today, no other channel than Facebook has such a concentrated amount of true, hyper-engaged, diehard Dr Pepper fans, which empowers the brand to deliver creative that directly stems from the audience itself. But, these stories don’t stop with a Facebook post.
In 2013, for instance, Dr Pepper developed /1 One-of-a-Kind Productions — a digital content series that celebrated influential fans of Dr Pepper who had a one-of-a-kind talent to share with the world.
The strategy was simple: Listen in social media, find one-of-a-kind influencers professing their love for Dr Pepper and ask them to tell their stories. Every month, the brand created a new /1 One-of-a-Kind story exclusively for online consumption. It profiled individuals from all walks of life, like Leandra Medine, founder of The Man Repeller, one of the most popular fashion blogs in the world; Mike Mo, a professional skateboarder and sunglasses entrepreneur; and heavy-metal guitarist Andy Williams, who wears his love for Dr Pepper quite literally on his sleeve.
Over the course of the campaign, the videos touched millennial consumers who shared the same passions as the one-of-a-kind influencers, from skateboarding, to sports, to fashion, and built a conversion of brand diehards that extended beyond the confines of Dr Pepper’s day-to-day social content.
This next example takes Dr Pepper’s social listening and engagement skills a couple steps further. In Spring 2013, Dr Pepper came across a young athlete named Justin Tucker, who at the time was a relatively unknown kicker for the Baltimore Ravens. For years, he had posted his love for his “ice cold Pep” on his Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds. One day, the Dr Pepper social team reached out to Tucker and asked if it could tell his story. He agreed.
After digging a bit deeper into what made this Dr Pepper super fan truly one-of-a-kind, it was discovered that he had a unique hidden talent the world had not yet known: This star NFL kicker could sing opera in seven languages. As soon as the video hit YouTube, it made the local news, and then national news. A social media frenzy ensued.
When he kicked a record-breaking six field goals in a game against the Detroit Lions, the company mailed him a gift basket of six Dr Peppers to congratulate him on his win. (His unprompted thank-you Instagram made national headlines.) And, when he was up for the Pro Bowl, Dr Pepper rallied its Facebook fans to help get him there.
“It worked,” says Nichols. “We like to think we helped him reach his goal of getting to the Pro Bowl as much as he has helped us reach our goal of connecting with fans.”
These stories are examples of Dr Pepper’s revamped approach to content and storytelling — optimize and “atomize” content for a fragmented media ecosystem, maintain authenticity, and most of all, stay nimble.
The Takeaway
If there is one thing that Nichols would like you to take from this story, it’s “Think like a fan, act like a fan.”
She elaborates: “Consumers most often feel compelled to connect with a brand on social because they truly love the brand, the product or what the company stands for. This is valuable because it gives you the ability to take it a step further and convert connected consumers into passionate brand advocates via social content.”
Rather than jumping at every trend and every new platform, or developing complex campaigns that are removed from the core audience behaviors, consumer goods marketers have to take a step back and evaluate how it fits into the context of their audience and whether it truly ladders back to the brand’s objectives.
What’s next for Dr Pepper?
“We know we have a diehard fanbase of passionate brand advocates and that the product is steeped into culture through our niche network of fans. However, what can we pull from that in order to capitalize on it even further?” asks Nichols.
By digging in and pulling deeper insights, Dr Pepper plans to shape not just its content, but the overall program, and possibly business as a whole.
With Facebook growing rapidly as a powerful consumer touchpoint, Dr Pepper needed to act fast to reignite fan passions on Facebook and, in turn, drive more consumers to the page and into stores to buy its products.
“Above all else, we want to champion this unique brand passion on Facebook and elevate the belief that we are a one-of-a-kind brand for one-of-a-kind people,” says Shaun Nichols, vice president of Integrated Content Marketing, Dr Pepper Snapple Group.
Shaking Things Up
In 2010, Dr Pepper partnered with Code and Theory (www.codeandtheory.com), one of the largest independently owned and creatively led agencies in the United States, to revamp Dr Pepper’s social program. What happened next was nothing short of miraculous. In just 15 months, Dr Pepper’s Facebook fan count skyrocketed from one million to 10 million.
How did they do it?
They found a new voice for the beloved brand: “For Peppers, by Peppers”. By listening to its audience members, Dr Pepper was able to understand why they love the brand. This step was invaluable in determining what social media content to build upon and amplify these consumer habits.
“Every brand has its loyalists. However, Dr Pepper’s show a passion for the brand unlike any other. They live and breathe Dr Pepper,” explains Nichols. “By honing in on this key group of die-hard fanatics and creating content for them in particular, we were able to push engagement further, build brand advocacy and convert our casual consumers into engaged super fans.”
At the same time, Dr Pepper and Code and Theory discovered that heavy digital users made a large portion of the Dr Pepper audience. These are the type of fans who are active Reddit users, digital-savvy blog readers and plugged-in millennials who naturally navigate all corridors of the digital underground.
“We established our credibility with them by putting a one-of-a-kind Dr Pepper spin on Internet trends in real time as those trends were happening, and seeded it into our ongoing content,” says Steve Baer, managing partner, Code and Theory.
Lastly, in order to keep content on the edge of conversation, Dr Pepper developed a brand newsroom wherein employees from all different disciplines sift through trends and learnings gleaned from data platforms, like Oracle Social Cloud (www.oracle.com/social) for social listening, social analytics and social publishing. Oracle Social has deep listening, global reach, a unified social media management platform, and integrations with Customer Experience (CX) applications. Therein, Dr Pepper could spot opportunities for inserting the brand into the most relevant conversations.
“We all contribute to an internal Facebook group, where we share ideas and insights throughout the day. In-person meetings throughout the week also help us to revisit each brand’s larger purpose, persona and story — an invaluable exercise in helping each brand stay relevant and remain flexible,” says Baer.
The Ripple Effect
By listening to what its audience is saying, and delivering messaging that builds upon that insight, Dr Pepper’s social media following grew from one million to 10 million Facebook fans in just 15 months (the brand has acquired more than 16 million Facebook fans to date).
Code and Theory also helped Dr Pepper increase fan engagement 64 percent from 2011 to 2012, and another 46 percent from 2012 to 2013. What’s more, a recent study by Datalogix (www.datalogix.com) showed that after someone becomes a fan of Dr Pepper on Facebook, he or she takes 35 percent more trips to the store to buy Dr Pepper.
These results prompted Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) to award Dr Pepper first place in the Social Relationship category of the prestigious Groundswell Awards competition, which honors excellence in the effective use of social media to advance a business goal.
Beyond Facebook
Today, no other channel than Facebook has such a concentrated amount of true, hyper-engaged, diehard Dr Pepper fans, which empowers the brand to deliver creative that directly stems from the audience itself. But, these stories don’t stop with a Facebook post.
In 2013, for instance, Dr Pepper developed /1 One-of-a-Kind Productions — a digital content series that celebrated influential fans of Dr Pepper who had a one-of-a-kind talent to share with the world.The strategy was simple: Listen in social media, find one-of-a-kind influencers professing their love for Dr Pepper and ask them to tell their stories. Every month, the brand created a new /1 One-of-a-Kind story exclusively for online consumption. It profiled individuals from all walks of life, like Leandra Medine, founder of The Man Repeller, one of the most popular fashion blogs in the world; Mike Mo, a professional skateboarder and sunglasses entrepreneur; and heavy-metal guitarist Andy Williams, who wears his love for Dr Pepper quite literally on his sleeve.
Over the course of the campaign, the videos touched millennial consumers who shared the same passions as the one-of-a-kind influencers, from skateboarding, to sports, to fashion, and built a conversion of brand diehards that extended beyond the confines of Dr Pepper’s day-to-day social content.
This next example takes Dr Pepper’s social listening and engagement skills a couple steps further. In Spring 2013, Dr Pepper came across a young athlete named Justin Tucker, who at the time was a relatively unknown kicker for the Baltimore Ravens. For years, he had posted his love for his “ice cold Pep” on his Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds. One day, the Dr Pepper social team reached out to Tucker and asked if it could tell his story. He agreed.
After digging a bit deeper into what made this Dr Pepper super fan truly one-of-a-kind, it was discovered that he had a unique hidden talent the world had not yet known: This star NFL kicker could sing opera in seven languages. As soon as the video hit YouTube, it made the local news, and then national news. A social media frenzy ensued.
When he kicked a record-breaking six field goals in a game against the Detroit Lions, the company mailed him a gift basket of six Dr Peppers to congratulate him on his win. (His unprompted thank-you Instagram made national headlines.) And, when he was up for the Pro Bowl, Dr Pepper rallied its Facebook fans to help get him there.
“It worked,” says Nichols. “We like to think we helped him reach his goal of getting to the Pro Bowl as much as he has helped us reach our goal of connecting with fans.”
These stories are examples of Dr Pepper’s revamped approach to content and storytelling — optimize and “atomize” content for a fragmented media ecosystem, maintain authenticity, and most of all, stay nimble.
The Takeaway
If there is one thing that Nichols would like you to take from this story, it’s “Think like a fan, act like a fan.”
She elaborates: “Consumers most often feel compelled to connect with a brand on social because they truly love the brand, the product or what the company stands for. This is valuable because it gives you the ability to take it a step further and convert connected consumers into passionate brand advocates via social content.”
Rather than jumping at every trend and every new platform, or developing complex campaigns that are removed from the core audience behaviors, consumer goods marketers have to take a step back and evaluate how it fits into the context of their audience and whether it truly ladders back to the brand’s objectives.
What’s next for Dr Pepper?
“We know we have a diehard fanbase of passionate brand advocates and that the product is steeped into culture through our niche network of fans. However, what can we pull from that in order to capitalize on it even further?” asks Nichols.
By digging in and pulling deeper insights, Dr Pepper plans to shape not just its content, but the overall program, and possibly business as a whole.
The 3 Tenets of Dr Pepper’s Facebook Turnaround
- Champion the Dr Pepper lifestyle by sharing content created and inspired by fans
- Speak the language of the Internet by putting a one-of-a-kind spin on trends in real time
- Insert the brand into pop culture by making timely references to significant moments of fans’ worlds