How Krispy Kreme Creates Personal Experiences with a Global Audience
When it comes to remarkable experiences, it’s hard to think of one that’s better than a donut shop. Picture it: the sweet smell filling the air, the shiny display case featuring rows of different flavors, the friendly staff waiting to greet you at the counter…
Kelley O’Brien, Director of Interactive, Digital, Social at Krispy Kreme joined The Content Experience Show podcast to discuss how her team does it, and what it means to bring personalized content experiences to a worldwide audience online.
“It’s awesome the way that they’ve literally actually created an experience around donuts, and just around Krispy Kreme in general.”
— Anna Hrach, co-host of The Conex Show
Kelley O’Brien joined the Krispy Kreme team 7 years ago and launched the brand on all social channels, creating communities within each. The audience’s engagement and feedback plays an integral role in how she does her job.
In the three social mentions coming from Krispy Kreme fans around the globe every minute, Kelley and her team began to notice a pattern in the amount of messages they received asking them to create particular types of donuts.
Rather than let an opportunity for further engagement pass them by, Kelley and her team decided to use this idea to fuel their next campaign. With that, the Krispy Kreme Vote for Glaze campaign was born.
To execute the campaign, the Krispy Kreme team created a landing page for voting and distributed it through their social channels. Kelley reported that during that time, her team saw a a 200% lift in post engagement, 200% increase in web traffic, and 20–30% social growth overall. Wow!
(If you’re wondering which glaze flavor won it all, it was lemon.)
With this campaign, what took the cake (or should I say, donut) for Krispy Kreme fans around the globe was that they had the chance to provide feedback and have their voices heard by one of their favorite brands. This campaign gave Krispy Kreme’s audience a chance at a truly personalized experience — a flavor of their choice.
Later in the episode, I challenged Kelley with an interesting question: When distributing content at a global scale, how does Krispy Kreme create personalized content experiences for regional segments of their audience?
To answer this, Kelley gave the example of their social presence in the United Kingdom where they have less shops. When marketing to this audience, Kelley and her team stray away from sharing photos of their donuts in the store environment, and instead show people as they’re eating donuts in other settings like in their homes or on the tube — experiences UK residents are more likely to relate to.
I absolutely love how much thought and personalization goes into Krispy Kreme’s strategy here. It just goes to show what knowing your audience and personalizing their experience does for not only your brand, but also your growth.
During this episode of The Conex Show podcast, Kelley also discussed how her social team uses Instagram Stories to share streams of their glazed donuts being made. While she at first thought the audience might soon get tired of it, Krispy Kreme fan engagement proved otherwise.
“That’s what they crave. That’s what makes fans say, ‘No matter what language I speak, no matter what country I’m in, this is the one thing I’m going to relate to the most with this brand.’”
