As a new consumer brand, we love receiving DMs from customers & hearing about their experience with our product. However, sometimes, there are DMs you just don’t want to receive. After producing one of our largest production runs yet, we noticed a couple small typos as we admired our beautiful, bright cans of pop. And it wasn’t long until other’s noticed too - and they were SURE to let us know!
When (two) minor typos were discovered on every, single, can - we had two options - be upset or laugh. And we did both, because humor is the best coping mechanism. Then, we turned lemons into ginger-lemon-culture-pop. We decided to pull the curtain back and show our community what happened with the goal of increasing trust and engagement with our customers. We also leveraged the moment to communicate an online sale and drive revenue. One of the typos was a short, three letter word that served as a great, simple promo code. We crafted a humorous, engaging and honest response (because reprinting thousands of labels just wasn’t in the budget). The team took to IG Reels & TikTok and generated a massively enthusiastic response. Oh, and it drove record breaking DTC sales too.
It was a tough feat to explain what had happened & communicate the promotion in a short form video. We knew we needed to catch people’s attention fast, clearly communicate the story, and keep their attention long enough to tell them they can save money too. Instead of static posts or stories, we decided to use a team-member’s voice over and just a collection of screenshots from the experience to cut to the chase and stay honest. The format worked great on IG Reels & TikTok - Email & Text was a tougher task. We decided to keep it simple once again - zoom in on a screenshot of the typo, hand over the promo code & link to TikTok for the full story. We of course had to lean in to the *many* emails consumers tend to inevitably receive throughout the year with the subject line “We Made A Mistake” when a proof read misses something or there’s an accidental e-blast to everyone who’s ever been to their site.
So that’s how “We MAE a Mistake” was born - it was serendipitous that the “d” in the word “made” is what was missing on our label.
Channels Utilized:
- TikTok
- IG Reels
- SMS
As a new brand, we are always aiming to consistently grow our word of mouth and monthly reach. When MAE launched on IG, we saw daily profile visits up 117% vs 90 day average. Although the promotion lasted just 3 days, the era of MAE lasted long after - we saw views grow from 10k to 213k over the course of the next several weeks. In addition to the DTC promotion that was tied into the campaign, retail is the larger revenue driver for the brand. Luckily, the campaign also caught the attention of retailers and led to new distribution gains as well.
TikTok Avg Video Views: +564%
TikTok Avg Profile Views: +377%
IG Reels Avg Video Views: +667%
IG Avg Profile Views: +117%
DTC Sales - Highest 3-day revenue since brand inception
