3 Smart Ways Johnsonville Sausage Leverages Social Listening For Success!

With humble midwestern roots as a family-owned and privately-operated company, Johnsonville is America's number one sausage brand. The company's sausage products are available in 45 countries worldwide, making their brand presence among consumers strong. While COVID-19 misinformation was rampant (especially within the consumer conversations within the food industry), Johnsonville monitored the evolution of the pandemic and its impact on the company, as well as other attributing factors via social listening. This raises the question of how did the brand giant combat these negative sentiments online?

Here’s a few ways the sausage producer used Digimind Social Intelligence Solutions to help understand the misinformation being spread about the brand, and identify other trends within consumer shopping behaviors during the pandemic to inform content and product strategy.

DIGIMIND SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

The social media team set up custom dashboards on the Digimind social listening platform to monitor the ongoing conversations about the brand, its competitors, and the market. This allowed the team to conduct daily monitoring of the developing conversation in relation to the different topics they were tracking.

Not only was Johnsonville able to discover key conversation topics consumers were discussing online, but they also identified challenges and opportunities that informed their web/social content strategy.  

Johnsonville’s team studied a few months of the brand, COVID-19 related consumer conversations, and identified two areas of concern facing the company.

• The brand was assumed to have affiliation with China
• Meat companies were temporarily being shut down due to COVID-19 related employee absences, which ultimately resulted in negative media about workforce protection response and unsafe working conditions within meat companies

They were able to correct the conversation that inaccurately stated they were owned by a Chinese firm, and emphasized to their customers about their midwest roots by being family owned and privately held, which drastically improved the brand’s reputation. Check out the business case created by Digimind to see how they transformed these negative sentiments into a positive solution for the brand.

Ordering groceries and food online was a major trend during the COVID-19 pandemic. Johnsonville gathered this information using Digimind to determine key trends in consumer shopping habits.

They wanted to know how these consumer behaviors were evolving, and how they could address them. The two main factors identified by consumer shopping & product usage analysis were:

• An increase in inquiries about online purchase options of their products
• Consumer conversation around how to store/freeze the product, since it was the first time customers were purchasing sausage in bulk online

Johnsonville swiftly reacted and created & distributed content related to cooking, grilling, and storing their sausage varieties, and their social customer service team answered questions related to this topic online to improve consumer engagement and loyalty.

Not only was Johnsonville able to keep the sentiment about their brand positive and put out correct information to the public, they uncovered new insights from the reporting widgets on their Digimind dashboard and identified the following key trends below:

• Discovered recipe fatigue among consumers due to staying at home and having to plan more than 3 meals a day
• Wanted to know how to cook their products indoors if they didn’t have the ability to grill outside

As a result, Johnsonville's team created and posted easy-to-make short recipe videos on their various social media channels, which inspired their customers to share their own recipes via their hashtag #SocialDistancingWithSausage, creating the largest amount of user-generated content ever in their history. The response generated high engagement and overwhelmingly positive feedback from their consumers.

The sausage giant was able to avoid a major crisis, combat negative sentiments online and turn the conversation into something positive about their products. By using the relevant insights and information accumulated from social listening, Johnsonville generated high engagement rates through their content strategy thanks to Digimind Social Listening tools!