The confectionery major has struck a partnership that will see dedicated teams from Twitter working for Mondelez International in Brazil, India, the UK and the US. Twitter teams will collaborate with local marketers within Mondelez to leverage Twitter’s analytic capabilities and boost engagement.
As part of the deal, according to The Financial Times, Mondelez commits to a certain ad spend with Twitter.
“This partnership will allow us to take our capabilities to the next level in terms of analytics, instant engagement and global scale and be on the forefront of real-time innovation,” said Bonin Bough, vice president of global media and consumer engagement at Mondelez International.
Discussing the move, founder of The Food Marketing Expert Vhari Russell backed the collaboration. “It's innovative. It’s a really clever way of engaging consumers again,” she told ConfectioneryNews.
“So many companies can’t get back to grass-roots with hundreds of consumers. If you have a brand like Oreo, you need to Tweet and engage in each time zone and very few businesses have the ability to do that.”
Mondelez will want to try and influence the shopping behavior and snacking habits of consumers in each of these markets, she said, something they can’t do just from tweeting at European tea time, for example.
Staying ‘relevant’ and driving offline sales
Adam Bain, president of global revenue at Twitter, said it is core for companies to remain in touch with the interests of consumers, particularly with a rapid consumer shift towards mobile usage.
Russell agreed that consumer engagement is vital and social media is an integral part of that. “This partnership means Mondelez will get an awful lot of brand presence. I think they’ll get a wider reach because there will be more people posting about them and their products.”
The partnership comes just weeks after the confectionery major announced its involvement in the testing phase of Twitter’s ‘offline sales impact’ service with Datalogix – a service enabling marketers to quantify the impact of promoted (paid for) and organic (regular, no-paid for) tweets on offline sales. Mondelez said at the time that the tool represented a “significant step in evaluating the power of real-time marketing”.
You can’t sell a product just on SEO
Despite the added Twitter strength Mondelez will gain from the partnership, Russell warned that the company must still focus on factors beyond analytics and SEO (search engine optimization).
“You can have the greatest SEO in the world and not sell a thing. It has to be built on quality communication – you need great copy and photography – and also great products,” she said.
This partnership, she said, has been calculated in a very astute way and Mondelez would have made projections and forecasts on what they want from it, in terms of consumer engagement and sales.
“It’s going to be very interesting to see who else jumps on the bandwagon, because I’m sure other big blue chip companies will.”