Kraft Heinz earns 39 million impressions from the Influenster community

Kraft Heinz brands drives targeted trial and awareness for new products leveraging Bazaarvoice’s Influenster community

Grocery shoppers are always hungry for new flavors from familiar food brands, which is why Kraft Heinz regularly launches new products. When the global company recently created eight new flavors of salad dressings, it knew getting customers talking about the dressings would be critical to launch success.

Kraft Dressings Vinaigrettes, Twisted Ranch, and Bitten sent samples to a select group of ideal consumers in Bazaarvoice’s Influenster community of 6 million+ members and encouraged them to share their experiences with a broad audience through reviews and social posts. This let the brands collect authentic content and generate social advocacy that sparked trial and increased awareness.

The three sampling campaigns exceeded the company’s goals and expectations, resulting in 98,000 pieces of user-generated content (UGC) on the Influenster site, 20,000 reviews, and 39 million impressions from 369,000 social posts, shares, likes, and comments from consumers.

“The campaigns for Kraft Dressings Vinaigrettes, Twisted Ranch and Bitten over-delivered on our targets for the program, delivering 2x the product reviews we expected, and the earned media was over 5x our program investment,” said Elizabeth Northrup, Associate Brand Manager for the three brands.

Spicing up meals with VoxBox sampling

Bazaarvoice curated and sent exclusive, branded sampling assortment packages (Custom VoxBoxes) to 13,500 consumers within Bazaarvoice’s Influenster community. These engaged, everyday consumers actively participate in product discussions and create content about the products they discover.

Bazaarvoice developed three segments of members based on thousands of data points, including demographics, psychographics, shopping preferences and behaviors, and social activity.

“The ability to hyper-target consumers based on behaviors and other characteristics beyond typical demographics was a key benefit in choosing Influenster,” said Northrup. “It ensured we didn’t just send products to a large group of people and instead to consumers who are interested in getting to know and love the brand long-term.”

Custom VoxBoxes with four new flavors of the brand’s Kraft Vinaigrettes line (Raspberry, Lemon Herb, and Balsamic) went to 6,500 consumers between the ages of 18-35 who use vinaigrette salad dressings and have previously tried other brands. Meanwhile, 3,500 members between the ages of 18-45 who enjoy creamy dressings and consider themselves somewhat healthy received two new flavors of the brand’s Bitten line (Creamy Lime Avocado and Lemon Poppy Seed). Finally, 3,500 members between the ages of 18-44 who frequently buy ranch dressing received two new flavors of the brand’s Twisted Ranch line (Garlic Smashed Buffalo and Cheddar Popped Jalapeno).

Savoring actionable, impactful insights

Matching the right products with the right consumers means the brand is collecting high quality social content, reviews, and photos that satiates the appetite of other shoppers on Influenster, Kraft Heinz’s My Food and Family Recipes site, retail sites, and across social media platforms.

“The quality of UGC from Influenster members was one of the biggest advantages,” said Northrup. “They were especially creative with their photos and gave us and other consumers a new way to see how the products can be used.”

UGC is also a scalable way for the brands to listen to consumers in real-time and glean insights straight from the most important source.

“Hearing directly from consumers about their experiences is a powerful way for us to identify specific attributes that people enjoy about our products and to make changes and improvements based on their feedback.”

Earning a spot at the table

Activating key consumers at-scale to create thousands of ratings, reviews, and visual content is the secret ingredient to any successful product launch. Getting new dressings into the hands of targeted consumers allowed the brands to leverage advocates early in the launch process to help introduce the products to a broader audience and compel other shoppers to try the new flavors.

“The VoxBox is a nice compliment to other marketing initiatives like media and in-store programs and is helpful for building trust and credibility over e-commerce where many consumers search for product reviews before trying something new. It has helped achieve our brand goals of driving trial with thousands of reviews and awareness with millions of impressions,” said Northrup. “We would definitely work with Influenster for sampling programs to support launches in the future.”

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