Caribou Coffee recently launched a new Twitter campaign, entitled You + Your Bou, to hear from customers about their lives and what they’re looking for from Caribou. Centered around the hashtag #MyBou, the aim of the campaign is both to better understand Caribou’s customers, and to engage them outside of the coffee shop.
The company has built up a significant social media presence, with nearly 27,000 followers on Twitter (@Caribou_Coffee) and over 286,000 fans on Facebook. The #MyBou promotion is featured prominently on the brand’s Facebook page, as a separate tab that is the default landing page when fans look for the brand on Facebook. The campaign has already surpassed 200,000 impressions and is expected to run through March 30, as reported by Fast Casual.
“You + Your Bou is going to inform us about the role of our brand in the daily life of our fans. It will bring back to the brand some new knowledge about how we augment the daily lives of our fans,” according to Alfredo Martel, Caribou’s Senior VP of Marketing & Product Management.
And fans are responding on Twitter, engaging with the hashtag through tweets like “#MyBou keeps me going all day” or “I love to take #mybou with me when we are enjoying a weekend morning waking up looking at the lake.” As further incentive for Caribou fans to share, the campaign offers prizes to randomly selected #MyBou tweeters.
Caribou also uses social media analysis to help determine which new products to launch. If the brand receives a large number of tweets requesting a specific product, the company may consider launching that product as a limited-time-offer to see how it performs in the market. However, Martel is also careful to ensure the brand maintains its “core set of values” rather than just “pursuing the next shiny object.”
How important is social media marketing to Caribou? “Frankly, for a brand like ours, we don’t have a lot of money to spend in media so we better be good in this type of network in terms or broadcast and power,” says Martel. He adds, “it’s also a way to extend what we drive in-store every day with the human connection and have our fans be a part of our brand.”
