In a past life, Dana Zemack was a chocolate expert and traveled throughout the country leading chocolate classes, workshops, tastings and parties. These days, she is a public relations pro at tech PR firm LaunchSquad and works with wonderful and innovative tech startups and emerging companies. To find Dana, tweet at @danamarcelle or check out the LaunchSquad blog.O, chocolate. You stole our hearts the day we met you (in Mexico, about 3,000 years ago). Since then, royalty and aristocrats have feasted on goblets of you, armies have sustained themselves by snacking on you, a whole town in Pennsylvania was built for the milk version of you, and copious lovestruck teenagers have swooned over heart-shaped boxes of you. The world has a deep, lengthy and curious history with chocolate. As a result, chocolatiers and chocolate-makers have the luxury of commanding an audience that is undyingly passionate about their products.
In a world where communication between brand and consumer continues to become more and more personalized, conversational and transparent, chocolate companies have a unique opportunity to connect. Most of those discussed here, which are smaller, artisanal brands, simply don’t have a ton of marketing spend at their disposal. Obviously, social media is a critical and powerful marketing tool. So the big question is, how do these companies maximize the fan love?
Neighborhood Darlings: Engaging Your Local Community
Bean-to-bar chocolate companies — as in those that make pure chocolate from scratch — are few and far between. Though the number of American artisanal chocolate makers has grown exponentially within the past six years, having a chocolate factory in your hometown is a pretty sweet and special treat.
The folks at Missouri-based Askinosie Chocolate work with a local baker to create special cupcake recipes using Askinosie’s chocolate. Then, every Tuesday (known at Askinosie as Cupcake Tuesday), the baker makes around 200 special cupcakes. According to Lawren Askinosie, whose official title is “Pursuer of the Passionates,” local residents get wind of the week’s latest flavors on Twitter, storm the Askinosie shop and the cupcakes sell out every week. During this past summer’s “Hide and Eat” campaign, the company hid chocolate bars inside the storefronts of other local businesses, posted clues on Facebook
and Twitter
each day and incited local residents to rush the different stores to discover the bars. Strategies to engage the local community are in a whole different realm than those focused on national or international fans. Neighborhood companies can offer their local fans something that no one else can have. It’s all about creating something really special, narrowing down the channels through which people can find out about it, and mixing things up a little by partnering up with other nearby businesses. Part of the allure of any artisanal food company is that engagement online can, with a little effort, lead nearby fans directly to something delicious that can be eaten on the spot.
We can learn a lot from the raging food truck obsession that’s taken over our big cities. Scharffen Berger, a leading American chocolate maker who is in a very different place in the chocolate market than the smaller companies included here, recently partnered up with New York City bakery Sweetery’s dessert truck, Street Sweets, to promote a Scharffen Berger chocolate cupcake recipe contest. Thousands of Scharffen Berger chocolate cupcakes were given away during two days in late October, with Twitter updates offering the truck’s whereabouts around the city.
Keeping It Real: Catering to Each of Your Audiences
Fans of Vosges Haut-Chocolatier can find their truffles, chocolate bars and other sweets online, at certain specialty retailers and at a handful of small Vosges boutiques called “Purple Houses,” after Vosges’ purple branding. Boutique patrons at the different locations range significantly, from the SoHo regulars who stop by the shop every couple days, to enthralled Las Vegas tourists who never dreamed that chocolate could be infused with wasabi and ginger. Clearly, different locations have different personalities. Each store has its own Twitter account, authored by the store manager. Vosges sets basic branding guidelines and then encourages managers to let their personalities shine through and cater their Tweets to their local customers. Followers of the Chicago O’Hare International Airport location will see tweets like “Bliss in B6!” — as in, gate B6, which is where the store is. According to Caroline Lubbers, who heads up Vosges’s national social media, “bliss at B6″ was tempting enough to make one traveler tweet back that she was actually excited for her Chicago layover.
Then there are the brand’s nationally focused social media campaigns. Vosges is a luxurious, glamorous brand, and a major part of the mystique of its truffles and chocolates are its exotic flavors and spices. Curry powder, candied violets and sweet guajillo chili pepper are some examples. In a recent “What kind of truffle are you?” Twitter campaign, fans tweeted their five main personality traits and received responses with links to which truffle they are. Find me anyone who wouldn’t want to be described as “zingy, crunchy, spicy, sassy, buttery sweet” Red Fire toffee.
Another Piece of the Puzzle: Supporting Sales
Beyond the consumers, small chocolate companies have another crucial audience to think about. This time it’s their retailers and wholesalers. Again, these are small companies whose owners and founders are oftentimes making the chocolate themselves. There isn’t a ton of extra cash available for mega sales teams.
Utah-based chocolate maker Amano has many hundreds of retailers. According to founder and owner Art Pollard, when Amano posts about a new product, not only does it get a sizable bump in online sales (which more than doubled for five days following its Facebook alert about the newly in-stock Montanya bar, for example), but the savviest of its retailers are also quick to respond with bulk orders. With a sales team of two, being able to get the word out instantaneously to even a fraction of its sellers both saves time and boosts sales. Vosges sees its wholesalers get involved on its Facebook Page. Furthermore, many people tweet their questions before calling customer service. Beyond using Twitter as a quick response customer service platform, Vosges also uses the platform to promote its retailers. The company keeps tabs on any tweets from people looking for its products and directs them to the nearest place to find its bacon chocolate bars, for example, even giving them a heads up about local sales and deals. Askinosie is also entering the local deals space on the location side, now exploring Facebook Places, with deals popping up as fans check in nearby.
Make Your Own and Eat It Too: Merging Online With Offline
As much as many of us wouldn’t mind popping into a local chocolate shop and making our very own signature sweets, this would likely result in a raging mess and personal escort right back out the door. From teaching tons of chocolate sculpture, truffle-making and tasting workshops, I can personally attest that being surrounded by chocolate makes people crazy.
PlayFirst’s popular Facebook game Chocolatier Sweet Society, which launched this past June, recently took an interesting approach to helping its 390,000 monthly active users connect virtual (and less messy) chocolate making to the real-life experience of actually eating the chocolates they’ve “created.” Players aim to become “world famous” chocolatiers of the Victorian era; they build their chocolate shop from the ground up, making decor and branding choices, choosing recipes, and making the chocolates. Players use virtual currency to purchase new recipes, source premium chocolate and exotic ingredients, and invest in other ways to bring more customers into their stores.
Just before Thanksgiving, PlayFirst launched a special initiative with San Francisco-based chocolatier Charles Chocolates, a small batch, artisanal brand with a look and feel that matches the game’s Victorian aesthetic. Players can not only get recipes and make branded chocolates from a special collection that Charles Chocolates created just for the game, they can also buy the real-world versions of the chocolates, which are only available through the game and cannot be bought in any store, online or off. According to Eric Hartness, who leads the social team at PlayFirst, this is the first time that you can create a virtual good in a social game and then buy it in the real world. PlayFirst saw installs rise 54% for the four days following the day of launch, and re-engagement of existing players increased by 16%. Players have since created more than 135 million pieces of Charles Chocolates for their virtual shops (the most popular being “toasted almond clusters,” of which 52 million were made).
Askinosie, right in line with tapping Facebook to engage online fans for real-world product purchases, has plans for a Facebook-based store.
Ask Around: Crowdsourcing Your Product
Once the community is built out and thriving, there’s another opportunity that presents itself, though not all chocolate companies would dare to take it on. One innovative brand crowdsources its entire line. Tcho, based in San Francisco and led in part by CEO Louis Rossetto and President Jane Metcalfe (also known for co-founding Wired Magazine), was the first company to launch a chocolate line in beta. Marketing associate Larry Del Santo explained that the beta concept is the foundation of the company — appropriately, the store is called “beta store” and factory tours are called “beta tours.”
It’s soon launching its first line of milk chocolate bars, expected to be out in 2011. To develop the bars, this past June, the company tapped its fans to beta test different recipes. The beta bars were available for purchase online, and anyone who was interested in participating could try them out and share their feedback through an online form. About 90% of the participants were online and the rest did their trials in-store.
Though the company expected to run the beta through the summer, all the bars sold out within the month. Del Santo also explained that milk chocolate makes for a particularly fun beta. What do they test for? A few things: Much like wine grapes, cacao beans are grown in different places around the world in a variety of climates and soils, and therefore have different flavor profiles. Chocolate tasters can look for flavors and subtleties similarly to how they might taste wine. But unlike their darker counterparts, the taste of milk bars goes beyond the straight bean blends, as the type of milk plays a major role. All that said, this past October, Tcho introduced a line of milk chocolate bars sold exclusively at Starbucks. This collection wasn’t offered out to the world in beta; its style and flavor was developed internally.
Go On. Take a Bite.
Some swear it’s an aphrodisiac, others stand by its supposed magical antioxidant powers, and still others buy it in bulk to remedy a bad mood. But overall, the vast majority of us have a deep, emotional connection to the cocoa beans that are hacked out of odd-looking pods to be dried, roasted, ground and blended with cocoa butter, sugar and vanilla (sometimes) until it all morphs into the velvety goodness with which we are all so enamored. All artisanal food companies, both big and small, can learn from how these chocolate makers and chocolatiers are innovating and engaging with resources that are often quite limited.
What other interesting social media campaigns have permeated the foodie world? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Enter the blogshop, a term used in Singapore to describe teenagers setting up a free blog with items for sale, usually funky fashions or accessories. Forget shopping carts or credit cards for most blogshops–buyers simply email or leave a comment for what they want, then do a bank transfer, or hide ‘concealed cash’ in an envelope. The buyers pick up their goods by mail, or by meeting at a subway station. Sometimes buyers band together for a ‘shopping spree’ to Taiwan or Korea to pick up the latest fashions.
