Hello Everyone!
The US chocolate confectionery is largely dominated by two companies, The Hershey Company and Mars Incorporated, with a market share of 31.2% and 29.2% respectively. Despite both brand owners holding 7 brands of chocolate each, the Mars-owned M&M and Snickers brands have outperformed the Hershey-owned Reese’s and Hershey’s brand in both US and globally.
M&M and Snickers have very distinct brand personalities which its target audiences could identify with. M&M brings its fun and quirky personality to life with its iconic characters and colors while Snickers adopts a teenage-goofball personality with its famous campaign “you’re not you when you’re hungry”
Paling in comparison, Hershey’s has an ambiguous brand personality with the advertising tagline “life is delicious” which cannot win the hearts of people, making this the possible reason why it is not performing as well as M&M and Snickers. As such, this paper shall look into how Hershey’s can enhance its brand personality through better brand engagement on Facebook.
Chocolate is for anyone with a sweet tooth regardless of gender or age. As such, Facebook becomes the ideal platform since it has the most number of active users and the most balanced age distribution of users compared to other social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
Insights
- Hershey’s has the fastest response time in answering comments and queries compared to Snickers and M&M
- M&M and Snickers have many campaign tabs on its Facebook page whereby it engages with its audiences and reward fans
- Hershey’s clearly lacks in asking its users questions or holding campaigns to reward them
- Hershey’s need to emphasize and communicate the brand personality of being joyous, sincere and warm.
Suggestions
- Introduce an elderly couple as its brand ambassador. The old man could be an old soldier that is quirky, humorous, loves puns and love poking fun at current affairs, while the lady could be gentle, loving and loves baking.
- As part of the campaign, the couple will have their own Facebook tabs on the Hershey’s Facebook page respectively. For 109 days, a daily Facebook post will feature the characters doing unexpected things including dancing on the street, playing pranks on each other and doing daily activities with a twist.
- Users may use the hashtag #Hersheylovinglife to submit their own stories, requests or interesting ideas on how the couple can interact with each other.
- Short videos offering sneak peeks of how these two characters plan on surprising each other with the Hershey products.
That’s all folks!
Toh Le Qi
Marketing communication 