Honest Tea’s recipe for social media success depends on honest confessions
Iced tea brand Honest Tea is drinking up the benefits of mobile video, social influencers and ecards to ramp up awareness during its busiest time of year with a campaign encouraging consumers to share their honesty.
The Refreshingly Honest Project is leveraging social media for a campaign to spur user-generated content regarding honest thoughts about imperfect moments in everyday life. A docuseries starts off the campaign with real consumers discussing honest moments such as a mother telling a white lie while parenting, paired with a series of ecards that depict common moments that many experience in life.
“Social media has always been a fun way for us to promote honest interactions with our customers and our #RefreshinglyHonest campaign is no different,” said Ami Mathur, general manager at Honest Tea. “By asking some of our favorite influencers to share their #RefreshinglyHonest stories and creating some incredible shareable videos and #RefreshinglyHonest e-cards, we have truly created a campaign where social media is an essential cornerstone, not just a small component.”
Honesty is the best policy
Honest Tea’s summer campaign is promoting a “refreshingly honest” outlook with a series of social media pushes, which will increase throughout the upcoming months. Users are sharing their own stories, photos and content regarding honest moments that they usually keep to themselves.
The iced tea brand is promoting the hashtag #RefreshinglyHonest for social media users to share their content, and is prompting them to tag the brand in their post as well.
Honest Tea is congregated social media content an mobilized site
Influencers on social media are leading the charge, hoping consumers will follow with their own campaign posts. For instance, Instagram user @stacieflinner posted a photo of herself eating donuts with the caption reading “in Instagram land this could be ‘breakfast on the pier’ but in reality David and I each ate 3 doughnuts for dinner last night and washed them down with a beer,” along with hashtags #malasada #refreshinglyhonest.
Honest Tea is sharing a video series that displays real consumers talking about their confessions. For instance, one mother discusses how she lies to her kids saying the ice cream plays music when he is out of ice cream.
Honest Tea’s video
Social media users are also sharing ecards regarding the campaign such as one that reads, “I told my kids some candy can have bugs inside, so now I always take the first bite for ‘quality control.’” The text is featured along with images of small candies and a ladybug.
User-generated campaigns
Similarly, consumer packaged goods brand ConAgra wanted to make at-home cooking more palatable for millennials, who have a reputation for enjoying ordering out, by encouraging consumers to take a pledge to cook at home for an entire week (see more).
Hilton‘s DoubleTree also attempted to shift social conversation regarding travel to a more positive sentimentality by prompting users to share stories of kindness, and will be using social tracking to determine the impact of the campaign (see more).
“The #RefreshinglyHonest Project aims to help people embrace the perfectly imperfect by shining a light on the authentic and amusing feelings we all have but may not share,” Ms. Mathur said. “Social media has always been a platform for people to share their honest thoughts and experiences, so we are hoping this campaign will engage our fans and tap into this great source of user-generated content through the #refreshinglyhonest hashtag.”
