Kraft Food’s “Mac & Jinx” – Case Study

Kraft Foods is a food brand that is recognized worldwide. On their “About Us” page on their main website, they have an image of quick facts about the company. Their mission statement is “our mission is to be North American’s best food and beverage company. Our company has a great heritage that we’re building into an even greater future.” Some of their interesting facts include that they have $19 billion in annual sales and that 98% of North American households have Kraft brands in their pantries and refrigerators. Below are some more interesting facts.

Kraft has both a Facebook page and a Twitter. The campaign that I chose to evaluate was on the Twitter platform. I think that they do an outstanding job with connecting to their audience and keeping people involved and interested. One strong point to their presence is that when a fan tweets them, they almost always tweet them back in a timely fashion. This type of interaction and communication make their audience people important to the brand itself.

Kraft has 40,457 followers on twitter and they currently have 8,088 tweets. It looks like they try to tweet every single day and they have a consistency involved. Kraft tweets about recipes, products, and different uses for products, pictures, contests, and cool opportunities. Kraft is following 6,076 people and they interact with them frequently.

The campaign that I was struck by for this project was Kraft’s “Mac and Jinx,” beginning in March 2011. This campaign used Twitter to encourage people to tweet something with the phrase “mac & cheese” in it at the same time. Kraft would go through and identify the pairs and send both sides of the pairs a link. The first one to click on the link and give Kraft their address got five free boxes of Mac & Cheese plus a T-Shirt in the mail. According to the Barn Raisers, “this campaign took advantage of the real-time nature of Twitter boosting the brand’s Twitter followers by 400% and at one point gaining over 300 mentions of “Mac & Cheese” per minute on Twitter.” Also, the phrase “Mac & Cheese” became a trending topic almost immediately. What they created here was incredible and it received a great buzz. I think that the goal of this campaign was to get people talking about their products. They succeeded in this.

I found this campaign interesting because it was something I have never seen or heard of before. They took a leap into the social media world by trying something different. They had a couple of other campaigns to follow and I am sure more to come. They do a really good job connecting to their fans and communicating with them in a way that gets them involved and makes them take action.