Sour Punch® is a powerful young candy brand that was looking to better connect with it's core audience: digital-savvy millennials.
Sour Punch needed to accomplish 3 main goals with a limited marketing budget:
Grow brand awareness and differentiate from competitors, especially Sour Patch.
Drive sales and generate traffic in the aisle to become a viable partner for national retailers.
Create authentic brand interactions with millennials both offline and in the digital space.
Through the use of consumer segmentation studies, American Licorice identified the profile of an ideal Sour Punch eater: young, curious, and hungry for digital content. I was the lead on creating a social media strategy that suited the profile and voice of the brand and connect with fans in the digital space. By focusing on strong content, highly-targeted paid media campaigns, and maintaining a irreverent and playful theme, I was able to grow the brand's presence in the social space from a little over twenty thousand to just over 2 million fans in under 3 years on a supremely constricted budget. Since then, with a dedication to quality over quantity, social media has become a pillar of the Sour Punch media strategy. Sour Punch has become American Licorice's highest grossing brand, surpassing flagship brand Red Vines, and is excelling in connecting digital media to sales, sometimes hitting as high as a 60% lift at the shelf during social-media focused campaigns.
During my time managing the brand's social presence, we successfully launched a brand extension (Sour Punch Punchies), pulled off a brand re-design, executed three integrated loyalty campaigns.
My contributions:
Led social media strategy
Manage content strategy across all social media presences
Work with brand team to build and maintain editorial calendar
Manage paid media strategies to build brand community
Deliver insights around audience, campaign performance, and key selling ideas
Drove awareness for brand extension Sour Punch PUNCHIES through a influencer targeting
Concepted, managed, and executed the "KRNFX x Sour Punch Beatbox" campaign