In an interview with BrandWeek, Jose-Alberto Duenas, Kellogg’s Marketing VP of Ready-To-Eat Cereals, discusses the impact of social media on familiar brands like Special K and Pop-Tarts.
It’s worth reading in full, but the following passage jumped out as being particularly insightful:
BW: So, you can’t just take any brand and put it in social media?
JD: You have to start from a really strong base. You can’t, in a way, start from scratch with social media, especially because consumers have to have a certain level of engagement with the brand. With Special K, we know the brand already has that level of communication and emotional engagement with consumers, so we’ve given them a new way to interact with the brand. That was the right first step. [With Pop-Tarts], we were building off a very strong, already established relationship with kids. Kids have been using digital media, but Pop-Tart’s [foray into social media] also opened up [the brand’s] target in terms of having a conversation with teens and moms, which came later.
This simple idea is so often lost in the scramble to “get social”: you must have something which makes people want to engage with your company. It might be the strength of a brand, like Pop-Tarts. It may be terrific content. In the end, you must have something more exciting to people than simply announcing that they can follow you on Twitter now.
via How Special K Became a Social Media Star.
