Objectives

Maruchan is a long beloved instant ramen noodle brand, but it's still a commodity product in a category with a lot of choices for consumers. Maruchan looks the stand out, stay top of mind, and gain preference among consumers in this crowded and comeptitive space.

Maruchan's organic social media presence aims to build brand love and create connection with consumers. So that when the step into the aisles of their grocery or convenience store, Maruchan is the brand that they reach for--effectively turning what might be viewed as a keep pantry staple into . In 2023, we aimed to do this by maintaining cultural relevance and winning with Gen Z--with a little feeling and a lot of flavor.

With a passionate community of super fans, we know that having two way conversation and listening to our community are an essential part of build connection and affinity.

Strategy and Execution

For Maruchan, authentic human connection is our approach to community management. We don't utilize community management as an opportunity for a one-off, buzzworthy stunt, but an always-on point of contact, connect, and engagement with our biggest fans. We built a comprehensive engagement strategy to guide not only how we help our customers when they need us, but how we proactively show up in conversations they care about, and represent the voice of our customers in our content and overall social presence. Providing customer service is tablestakes, and we take a full 360 degree approach.

We developed a community management persona for Maruchan that is ownable and relatable. We're human (not robotic), playful (not stiff), and just the right amount of quirky. We speak in the language of our followers, but not in a way that's cringy or try-hard--we pick and choose what feels right for us. We tailor our CM presence and voice to uniquely fit each channel we're active on.

We activated this persona through several always-on community management tactics:

1.  User-Generated Content: It's important for our fans to see themselves in our content. As a brand, Maruchan is lucky enough to have a lot of fan created content, and we reserve about 25% of our content for sharing this content. Identifying the best of the best content, sourcing, and curating, is a part of our always-on efforts.
2. Surprise and Delight: For Marucha, surprising and delighting our customers is part of our DNA. It's not a campaign or a flash in the pan, but we're regularly seeking out our biggest fans talking about us on all platforms and sending a little love their way--whether it's merch, product, or brand kits.
3. Reactive Content: We constantly have an ear to the ground for conversations our fans are having about us to inform our content. You're putting hot honey on your ramen? Ok, we will too. We also are looking for trending cultural conversations, content, and moments that are right for the brand to participate in and quickly creating content to support. You're spinning around with your pets to a Taylor Swift song? So are we.
4. Playing the Brand Game: Maruchan isn't afraid to banter with other brands that make sense for us to be in conversation with. We play in the "brand Twitter" and "brand Threads" space that help us get noticed and bring new ramen lovers into the fold.

Results

What we've built as a result is an extremely passionate community of ramen lovers all over the world. In the last year on Maruchan's organic channels we gained:

33% net follower growth

+14K followers amassed on Threads since platform launch

2.1M organic impressions

105K organic engagements

355% increase in organic shares

Media