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Rejuvenating a Brand Through Social Media

Article in MIT Sloan Management Review · August 2014

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 Rejuvenating a
Brand Through
Social Media
SOCIAL
BUSINESS When Nestlé UK let customers vote via social media for their
favorite new flavor of the company’s Kit Kat Chunky
chocolate bar, customer engagement increased — and Nestlé
developed successful new offerings.

Matthew Mount
Marian Garcia Martinez

Research Highlight June 17, 2014 Reprint #55412 http://mitsmr.com/UIwu3V

INTELLIGENCE
[SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING ]
Rejuvenating a
Brand Through
Social Media
When Nestlé UK let customers vote
via social media for their favorite
new flavor of the company’s Kit Kat
Chunky chocolate bar, customer
engagement increased — and Nestlé
developed successful new offerings.
BY MATTHEW MOUNT AND MARIAN GARCIA MARTINEZ
Today’s managers understand the potential of social media en-
gagement for generating business value. With each click, comment,
“like” or post, consumers leave vital pieces of information — in
effect, virtual footprints — that can be aggregated to generate new
insights for brand management and engagement. However, com-
panies often lack the right tools to guide them in this process.
Without a framework with which to convert the mass of user-
generated content into knowledge, the business value of social
media stays hidden in plain sight.
One exception is Nestlé, which has developed a strong capacity
to manage its social space and extract useful insights from the
voluminous data created via social media. To gain insights into
how Nestlé has learned to capture this value, for a year we followed
Nestlé UK’s campaign to rejuvenate its Kit Kat chocolate bar brand
among 18- to 24-year-olds. By successfully leveraging social media
for the Kit Kat brand, Nestlé UK was able to induce positive word
of mouth through the development of consumers who serve as
14 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SUMMER 2014
brand advocates; increase sales and innovativeness; and generate a
higher return on investment.
From these observations and other insights from our research,
which also involved an in-depth study of social media use by an-
other Nestlé UK brand, we have derived a four-step framework
that we believe will enable companies in any sector to extract
valuable information from the vast amount of data that social
media engenders.
A Four-Step Framework for
Social Media Utilization
After an extensive series of interviews and detailed observations of
Facebook fan pages, we found that Nestlé UK followed a four-step
utilization framework, which we call the SELI (Scan, Engage, Learn
and Internalize) framework, to strengthen its Kit Kat Chunky brand
by nurturing a social network. The sequential steps of this frame-
work are documented in the following:
Before you begin: Specify the goal or objective. Before apply-
ing the framework and engaging with consumers on social
networks, senior managers should specify a goal or business
objective underlying the conversation with the consumer. In par-
ticular, managers need to direct the channel toward achieving a
specific marketing or brand goal, such as increasing brand aware-
ness, brand loyalty and engagement, intelligence gathering, or
new product development.
In this case, Kit Kat brand managers wanted to find ways to
leverage social media as a means to build enthusiasm among 18- to
24-year-olds for Kit Kat, a leading chocolate bar brand for Nestlé
UK. Given the rapid proliferation and use of social networking
tools among 18- to 24- year-olds, as well as the sheer volume of
user information and content available about them online, social
media was an obvious channel for brand development — espe-
cially as the Kit Kat brand already had its own dedicated Facebook
fan page and an active user audience of more than 200,000 users
at the time.
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
By using an integrated polling tool that allowed users to freely comment on, “like”
and vote for different flavors, Kit Kat managers built customer interest in the brand.
STEP 1: Scan and map the social space around the brand
and its competitors. Researchers have known for the better part
of a decade that insights embedded in social networks are an im-
portant source of brand-related business intelligence. Managers
should actively monitor and track user-generated content — the
conversations that are happening on both their own and competi-
tors’ social media pages — to help identify emerging trends. To
extract information about the Kit Kat brand, Nestlé UK managers
used advanced IT tools to analyze, text mine and data mine user-
generated content to find clues about how they might deepen
attachment to the brand. One such insight: Flavors were often a
major topic of conversation among Kit Kat fans posting on the Kit
Kat Facebook page. As one manager pointed out:
It gave our fans a forum to discuss flavors, whether that be
Kit Kat flavors in other markets like Japan, where we have
green tea and Swiss cheese …. The product is why they are
there; they want to talk about the brand. This was a perfect
lead for us to use our Facebook audience to drive commercial
success of [the] Chunky brand by allowing them to cocreate
on flavors that would become a permanent [brand] fixture.
STEP 2: Engage with consumers on social networks to in-
crease external knowledge inflows. Next, companies should
engage and create a dialogue with consumers based on the insights
developed by scanning the social media space. Today’s social
networking sites support multimodal means of communication
that can include text, pictures and audiovisual tools, as well as the
integration of additional platforms — for example, embedding
YouTube videos on Facebook. By using these tools, managers
increase access and outreach to engage a larger audience of con-
sumers in a way that may help further develop and refine the
market insights the company gains.
In 2012, for this second step, Nestlé UK started a social media
campaign — “Choose a Chunky Champion” — to capitalize on
user interest in Kit Kat flavors and to engage users in cocreation by
voting on new flavors. The campaign urged users to vote for their
preferred new flavor from among several choices that, in turn,
were based on fan page user comments. Fans chose their favorite
among white chocolate, double chocolate, orange and peanut but-
ter and were promised that the winner would become a permanent
new flavor. Votes were taken over a 40-day period.
By using an integrated polling tool that allowed users to freely com-
ment on, “like” and vote for different flavors, Kit Kat managers built
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
customer interest in the brand and stimulated much more content
than the brand had generated before. By using and posting content
more strategically, Nestlé managers boosted interest in the brand and
gained vital information for brand development and other strategic
goals. Beyond stimulating conversations about the brand, Nestlé used
this process to gauge consumer reactions as well as interactions, opin-
ions and behaviors in relation to the content consumers had posted.
STEP 3: Learn from engagement with consumers. Once the
company is in an active process of creating a strategic dialogue with
consumers on social media, the next step is to piece together the
knowledge acquired to ensure learning. Learning occurs through a
conversion process, in which the company uses polls, conversation
threads and open-ended questions to make user-generated content
more digestible.
Nestlé UK outsourced this capability through an active partner-
ship with Facebook as well as with digital agencies that helped the
company handle the volume of data and user-generated content
flowing from Kit Kat’s Facebook fan page. As the communication
manager stated:
We work alongside Facebook and digital agencies to help us
use the data and make the most of it. They help us to realize
the capability on there [social media], keeping us up to date
with how our demographics are changing and the trends
they see from our social space.
Powerful analytics and internal capabilities are required to derive
meaning from social media interactions. In our research, we found
that lack of an internal capability to deal with the large volumes of data
generated on social networks can hinder a business’s ability to gain
insights from its end-user communities. The success of Nestlé UK’s
partnership with Facebook suggests that intermediaries or consultan-
cies can play an important role in translating user-generated content
into explicit knowledge that the company can learn from to realize the
benefits of social media engagement. This process helped Nestlé UK
managers uncover more detail about user impressions of the brand,
new product opportunities and potential opinion leaders whose
enthusiasm might be nurtured to create word-of-mouth effects and
increase awareness among the brand’s target audience.
STEP 4: Internalize and apply knowledge gained from social
networks. Next, managers must communicate the lessons and
knowledge learned from (Continued on page 16)
SUMMER 2014 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 15
INTELLIGENCE
Rejuvenating a Brand Through
Social Media (Continued from page 15)
social network interactions throughout
the whole organization or division to
ensure that the new knowledge, best
practices and solutions gained from in-
teracting with the social networks are
put to work.
In this case, by using social media, Kit
Kat managers were able to conduct mar-
ket research on a larger scale than ever
before in the brand’s history. Specifi-
cally, managers reflected on the way
social media enabled them to conduct
large-scale market research at low cost.
By using an integrated polling tool on
Facebook that aggregated user votes, the
winning flavor (peanut butter) was au-
tomatically selected after the 40-day balloting period without the
need for any post-processing. Kit Kat marketing managers had
successfully engaged consumers in cocreation to generate and pro-
duce new brand alternatives that were better aligned with the
needs of their target audience, which at the same time facilitated
brand rejuvenation.
After the first campaign was a huge success, Kit Kat managers
decided to repeat the campaign the following year. In 2013, they
launched another “Choose a Chunky Champion” campaign — this
time, with mint, chocolate fudge, coconut and hazelnut on the ballot.
The implementation of social media for brand development
had a positive impact for Nestlé UK. By engaging consumers in
collaborative efforts for a new flavor, Kit Kat increased market
penetration by 8% among 18- to 24-year-olds, a key candy-eating
demographic. Furthermore, the social network interactions led to
the development of new brand advocates. As the assistant brand
manager pointed out, the campaign resulted in hundreds of thou-
sands of consumers communicating about the brand online:
That’s massive, and that’s people choosing actively to talk about
us. And it’s us creating excitement for them and giving them a
space and a forum to express that. For me, that is the key thing.
Consumers who serve as brand advocates in their social net-
works tend to have strong peer influence and word-of-mouth effects
within the social community. Advocates involved in the 2012
“Choose a Chunky Champion” campaign helped increased brand
engagement, with the Facebook fan page doubling from 200,000 to
more than 400,000 users. Following market introduction of the
campaign winner, the new peanut butter-flavored Kit Kat Chunky
16 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SUMMER 2014
was named 2012’s best new chocolate
confectionary product by The Grocer
magazine. As a result of the “Choose a
Chunky Champion” social media cam-
paign, brand equity, reach, engagement
and market success all increased.
However, if Kit Kat’s success show-
cases the potential of social media, it
also highlights why many companies’
social media efforts have failed to yield a
significant return. Our research suggests
that lack of an internal capability to
handle “big data” can be a key stumbling
block; Nestlé’s partnerships with Face-
book and digital advertising agencies
were a key component in the campaign’s
success. Another crucial component
had nothing to do with social media, per
se, but with the comparative lack of corporate hierarchy within the
Kit Kat social media team. We believe that hierarchical structures
can act as a barrier that prevents external knowledge of consumers
from reaching the business; flatter, less bureaucratic structures
seem to be as important to social media success as sophisticated
data analysis. Nestlé deployed a decentralized cross-functional
team spearheaded by an internal social media “champion” so the
team could more easily traverse internal functions and depart-
ments and avoid the structural barriers that often hamper learning
in Nestlé, as at so many global companies. As the social media
champion put it:
As I said before, our [Nestlé UK] size, internal processes and
procedures stop us from being proactive. As such, we follow a
decentralized approach to social media implementation across
brands, which allows us to be more flexible.
Although we focused on one social media campaign for a candy
brand, the four-step methodology we uncovered should be useful
in a variety of marketing contexts. Social media offers marketers
an unprecedented chance to know their customers better, but only
if they approach it the way they would any other major marketing
challenge — with a strategy, a spirit of inquiry and imagination.
Matthew Mount is a research associate in operations and innovation
management at Kent Business School at the University of Kent in
Canterbury, U.K. Marian Garcia Martinez is a reader in marketing at
Kent Business School. Comment on this article at http://sloanreview
.mit.edu/x/55412, or contact the authors at smrfeedback@mit.edu.
Reprint 55412.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014. All rights reserved.
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
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