Ferrara Candy connects with fans to make every sweet snacking moment memorable

From Lemonheads and Laffy Taffy to NERDS and SweeTARTS, Ferrara has been providing mouth-watering joy to consumers since 1908. Today, it shares that same “delight in every bite” across more than 25 brands, keeping store shelves across the U.S. stocked with legendary favorites consumers love while developing new flavors and products they desire.

Now, Ferrara is working to bring that same high quality and innovation to its digital presence. It wants to ensure each of its brands are well represented on social media with consistent, brand-approved messaging. And, in a world driven by social conversations, Ferrara also wants full visibility into the online chatter about its products — and to connect with consumers on their preferred social channels in a relevant and timely way.

As Brian Camen explains, responsibility for Ferrara’s social presence used to fall on another team, which used a content management system for publishing.

“While it was inexpensive, it was also inefficient,” says Camen, who is Ferrara’s senior director of media, content and public relations. “We faced issues like having content for one brand appear on a different brand’s social profile.”

Suffice to say, the user experience was a frustrating one, and the team went in search of a solution that would help them to better manage their end-to-end brand experience. It wanted a platform that would enable it to:

• Manage and publish content for 40+ social accounts
• Monitor social conversations relevant to its 25+ brands for omnichannel marketing strategies
• Expand its customer service to support ongoing sales growth brand expansion

Amplifying fan sentiment for organic marketing
When American singer-songwriter Halsey tweeted that she wanted a pack of Trolli’s Sour Brite Crawlers with only the strawberry-grape flavor, Ferrara’s marketing team spotted the special request immediately and quickly shipped a custom pack just for her. Upon receiving the pack of gummies, the influencer posted about it to her 23 million Instagram followers and 14 million X, formerly Twitter followers.

The ability to quickly spot and act on a cultural moment like this is thanks to Social Listening from Sprinklr Insights, which enables Ferrara teams to see real-time conversations around their products and the context in which they are being mentioned. It’s the engine behind the Brand Fan program that Camen and his team set up to capture when people are proactively talking about the Ferrara brands.

“We want to keep people as advocates and loyalists for life, which means reaching out and building a relationship with those who are vocal about their love for our brands,” explains Camen.

In another example, Kathryn Dobbs, the CMO of the Columbus Blue Jackets professional ice hockey team, confessed via tweet a personal, pre-game ritual: consuming Fun Dip, another beloved Ferrara product. After posting about it, her ritual became a trend among her followers, along with hundreds of thousands of Columbus Blue Jackets fans.

“When we saw this conversation about Fun Dip, we saw an opportunity to be part of the community and join in the fun, so we went to the Columbus Nationwide Arena and collaborated with the Blue Jackets to give away Fun Dip to the first 8,000 fans during two games,” says Camen. "It was really fun, and Sprinklr supported us in uncovering all Fun Dip conversations."

Beyond the millions of impressions from Halsey’s and Dobbs’s tweets, Camen estimates the Brand Fan program garnered more than $2 million in earned media for Ferrara Candy Company in 2021.

Keeping up with the buzz on a single dashboard
Every day, the marketing team at Ferrara relies on its Social Publishing & Engagement dashboard from Sprinklr Social product to keep track of their social content. From content planning to publishing to managing engagement across more than 40 different social accounts, Camen says Sprinklr helps his lean team to operate more efficiently.

“I call Social Engagement our holy grail,” he says. It allows marketing team members to control their publishing intervals and engage with what’s happening in the world in real time. “It lets us ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ at any time, which is so important.” Sometimes, certain events can take over national headlines, he says, “and we want to be able to either engage with what’s happening, or stop publishing for a while. Sprinklr lets us do this with ease.”

Improving customer service productivity
To meet customers on social channels, Ferrara employs 30 social customer service agents. Prior to implementing Sprinklr Service, there was no real way to measure the performance of this team. Agents studied up on the company’s engagement playbook and kept a close eye on Ferrara’s response matrix to ensure they were using the right tone and voice for each brand. But there was no way to track incoming queries and things like case response rate, SLA time, and customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

“We had goals around the number of cases our agents needed to respond to, but we didn’t have enough data to really see how we could improve our services to customers,” explains Camen.

Since implementing Sprinklr Service, Ferrara is now able to track and set goals for the customer service teams — and see their progress in real-time.

“It provides me eyes on how we are effectively using this tool as well as how effective we are with our social customer service,” says Camen.