[Updated] Social Media Strategy Review: Ice Cream Brands

Ice Cream brands have a lot of creative scope on social media owing to their fun brand positioning. That said, some brands are lagging behind in terms of creativity and non-progressive attitudes on Facebook and Twitter while others seem hesitant to fully commit to social media with a stop-start strategy.

I have studied these brands over a duration of 30 days, between 10^th February 2014 to 10^th March 2014. Given below is a list of the brands that I have analyzed as a part of my study-

• Baskin Robbins
• Cornetto
• Fruttare
• Gelato Italiano
• HaagenDazs India
• Kwality Walls India
• Magnum
• VadilalIcecream

Community Building

Fruttare, which has the most fans at 2.5 million, is leading the sector but has a growth rate of only 1.04%. Fruttare has a steep rise on its fanbase chart, considering that it has clearly gone on a massive fan buying spree between 27^th Jan ’14 and 29^th Jan ’14. Between these dates, it ramped up its fanbase from 7 lakh+ fans to 2.5 million+ fans.

Fruttare has posted less than 19 posts in the last 30 days and is hardly consistent with its content. Therefore, the growth rate, no doubt, suffers a great deal.

HaagenDazs on the other hand, has only 53K+ fans but had the highest growth rate of 126.41%. At this rate, the brand will beat the entire sector in no time, considering other brand growth rates are stagnant below 18%.

From 23K+ fans on 12th Feb ’14, HaagenDazs reached 46K+ fans on 17^th Feb ’14 and 55K+ on 24^th Feb ’14.

Within 5 days, how did the brand double its fan followers? Well, it did not do anything exceptional on its Facebook page, except for announcing the #MyHaagenDazsMatch activity.

Promoting a page and investing in social media marketing is a must do. However, investing in content is equally important, since it creates recall value and keeps you constantly connected to your audience.

Content Strategy

Baskin Robbins India posted 3 posts a day. Except for Kwality Walls, most brands are regular with posting.

Editor’s Note: Gelato India's data was not captured and thus we have removed the initial report on the same.

Fruttare, as mentioned above, posted only 17 updates in 30 days which has resulted in low engagement scores and consequently less growth too.

Using Social to Drive Footfall

HaagenDazs ice cream’s content strategy on Facebook and Twitter is to drive footfalls to their stores and the brand does not concentrate too much on building engagement online. The brand tries to woo online users to visit the store and try their menu in various ways.

The strategy of trying to drive footfalls to the store might help increase sales but is also helps to increase product awareness. With the #MyHaagenDazsMatch, the brand increased product awareness on Twitter.

Possibly because of this campaign, the brand scored the highest engagement score of 460. Therefore, it clearly worked in favor of  the brand's awareness. I believe the brand could have roped in influencers, but otherwise, the activity perfectly suited the brand.

Communication Strategy

Cornetto has a consistent communication strategy online as well as offline. As a brand, its offline communication has always been mushy, full of love and an ice cream that brings two lovers closer. The brand has been executing a similar strategy online as well, with campaigns like #DoSomethingCupid, recording a love song with overtones of love messages.

This seems to be working for the brand, considering the brand is creating a recall value and receiving a lot of engagement. Cornetto received the highest number of likes (1663) and shares (78) per post on an average.

The brand is executing the same strategy on Twitter with #He and #She hash-tags and romantic connotations all over its Twitter timeline.

Cornetto also jumps into conversations that suits its brand image and converses with users. Brands doing this are capitalizing on online discussions, making users connect with their products and successfully striking a good conversation.

Interactive Experiences

Magnum, a newly launched brand in India, has gone all out with its advertising and marketing activities, both online and offline.

The brand is trying to create interactive experiences for users. Through live installations across the city to #PleasurePatrol and the first Magnum bite, the display of images contribute to building a great brand value for Magnum.

Apart from these small activities, the brand is also holding Master classes in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune to communicate directly with its customers. Bloggers who write about the ice cream brands are acting as testimonials for the brand.

This is great way of using influence marketing to its advantage.

Not only is the brand making an effort to create interactive experiences offline, it is also making best use of social sites for customer service.

Magnum India on Facebook, has responded to the most number of user posts and has the best Average Reply Time (ART). 50% of the posts were answered at an ART of 21 hours and 14 minutes. All the other brands have taken over 1 day to respond.

Great customer service is a good way to grow followers as well as engagement rate. On Twitter, Magnum does the same and therefore has the highest number of followers (2298) and growth rate (10.11%).

As a newly launched brand, Magnum is helping with all inquiries about its retail store partners through Twitter. This is a great way to connect with customers and create brand value and strong customer care service online. Therefore it has the highest engagement score (732)and 1,111 tweets in the last 30 days.

A well-integrated approach of the brand while executing its marketing activities is commendable and has earned the brand the highest number of mentions (1,706).

Since Kareena Kapoor is the brand ambassador for Magnum, her influential tweets have also contributed to the mentions. However, to take it to the next level, the brand must start tracking conversations, especially those which can drive a good engagement. Below tweet has a famous influencer talking about the brand. However, Magnum's Twitter handle is not tagged in the tweet. Magnum can track such conversations, and convert Twitter influencers into brand ambassadors.

Brands that need to step up their game

Baskin Robbins has a product oriented social media approach. I wonder if this is any good for branding since users tend to start skipping through product posts after a while, owing to the repetitive nature of such updates. Instead of asking user choices through the below post, Baskin Robbins could have asked the same through a fun activity like HaagenDazs did with #MyHaagenDazsMatch.

Though the brand has done some fun activities in the past, using Pinky the Spoony for creating recall value and Countdown to Love Bites for Valentine’sDay, it has been pretty mediocre lately.

The brand is quite inconsistent with daily posts too and the graph below shows how the fan numbers are almost consistent along with a wavering of PTAT score.

Kwality Walls has recently started posting after a long gap (last posted in May 2013). The brand has launched a campaign called GoodBye Serious. It has posted a series of updates, trying to create branded content but falling short in many places. These posts have attracted no engagement or interaction.

With a community size of 5.2 million, I see this is a sheer waste of a huge community waiting to connect with the brand. Kwality Walls attempted at an activity to revive its page but it should have tried something more innovative.

GoodBye Serious does not contribute to the brand value, neither does it communicate anything specific about ice creams – what purpose does an ice cream have in a handbag? The content used by the brand comes across as amateur and should probably go back to the drawing board for re-evaluation. In my opinion, this is a perfect example of a brand campaign without direction or thought of the end result.

That said, the creatives and design is consistent with the newly launched website. Also, since it is a parent brand of Fruttare, Cornetto etc. and those pages are being used to promote individual products, Kwality Walls can afford to skip updates on a daily basis.

Sentiment

The Ice Cream sector should be the last one to have negative sentiments. We all love ice creams, after all!

While Cornetto had the most positive sentiment, possibly due to its love themed activities, only 3 out of 150 posts of Magnum are negative.

This could be because when a new brand is launched, there ought to be certain feedback, some of which the brand has replied to. These sentiments are based on the kind of tweets the brands reply to. If Magnum has replied to only 3 negative tweets, it should probably accommodate more, since it’s a new brand.

Conclusion

Ice cream brands must create tempting content updates on social platforms without being pushy about their products. Some of the major steps they can take are:

• Try to use social platforms for understanding customer behavior, patterns, desire and effectively curate a whole ice cream flavor around this survey.
• Connect closely with customers and interact with them by jumping into conversations revolving around celebration, birthdays etc.
• Create brand recall value through consistency, online offline integration and influencer activity.

Analytics support courtesy: Unmetric