Did the Wispa case study justify social media ROI

We got a pingback yesterday on an old blog post about the reintroduction to the market of the Cadbury chocolate bar Wispa. Our claim was that the success of Wispa in sales terms validated using social media in business decision-making. The blogger – working for a measurement agency – suggested it was not possible to attribute the extraordinary sales of the bar to word of mouth/social media. We disagree. The decision to bring back Wispa was triggered by a persistent series of campaigns, led by students, to revive the bar. These online petitions – which preceded the switching of the campaign to Facebook – provided much of the motivation for the move.

It was the decision to bring back Wispa that created the impetus behind it. What drove that decision was social media research showing the strength of interest in the bar. This is the “causality” referred to. The Wispa phenomenon – cleverly communicated – then caught the wave of interest in social media, and became a case study, used by Mark Zuckerberg himself, demonstrating the power of social media. It should be clear that arguments for the ROI on social media rest on the outcome of the original decision to bring back the bar. Thereafter many other marketing channels played a part in driving sales.

When Cadbury and their agencies won the prestigious IPA effectiveness gold award for the Wispa campaign, 2007-2009, Market Sentinel were invited to share our insights and data for the effectiveness case study. The results were a little surprising, however.

Our original hypothesis was that Wispa was the buzziest brand during the period. We naively thought that buzz=sales. That turned out not to be the case. Although there were strong peaks of activity pre-launch in 2007 and when the Wispa gold launched in 2009 in general the buzz was no greater for Wispa than for other confectionery brands. And – curiously – there was far less activity for Wispa than (e.g.) for Creme Egg, particularly over the crucial Easter period. This was counter-intuitive.

Wispa volume versus Cadbury benchmarks

We wondered if the story of Wispa was the story of the adoption of Facebook. The two things happened simultaneously. Facebook was cited in the context of the decision to reintroduce the Wispa. Wispa was much discussed as an example of the new trend of social action through the website and was even mentioned by CEO Zuckerberg in this context in a Guardian profile. Here is the growth of the Wispa conversation normalised against the growth of Facebook. (The data is a bit spotty here as we are going on estimates of Facebook size from public sources)

Wispa fan growth % normalised versus UK Facebook

The “Bring back Wispa” campaign pre-dated Facebook. There were petition sites dating back well before 2007. There was a stage invasion at Glastonbury in the summer of 2007. As Facebook took off in the UK, the bring back Wispa campaign grew there, first in the “group” functionality and then on the “Fanpage”. Growth plateaud off after October 2009. Wispa now lives on Twitter, which represents % of commentary on the brand.

Wispa all mentions Sept-October 2011 by site

Was there anything, in fact, unique about Wispa? What made the social media campaign resonate? What led to sales of £86.5 million over three years?

Two key things: first the brand did not try to ventriloquise the social media conversation, it simply acknowledged it and celebrated it.

Second: the brand, because of its status as a bellwether of the coming together of social media with a consumer brand, became itself (as in this piece) a case study. The result is that there IS something unique about the way Wispa is discussed, which is that it has more positive connotations than equivalent brands.

Sentiment Wispa vs. other Cadbury brands

People feel more warmly about the brand and talk more positively about it, for a simple reason: the brand itself has become emblematic of social media. That’s a hard thing to pull off, but Wispa has done it. And when you tweet about Wispa, you are celebrating the medium as well as the chocolate bar.

Wispa is an example of social media ROI, and in rather a complex way. Its rearrival was triggered by the existence of social media monitoring (our own) and amplified by the delighted discovery by consumers of their own empowerment. Can one attribute £25m+ a year of sales solely to “social media”? In this sense: the brand would still be languishing in Cadbury’s museum without the social pressure exerted during 2005-2007 by the internet petitioners. …