This story is the first in a series exploring how brands craft standout social media strategies. If you’d like to chat about how your brand is approaching social, Katie Hicks wants to hear about it. Reach out to her at [email protected].
A rubber chicken eating with the text overlay, “Let your son shine.” A pair of eyes floating over rolling green hills. Masked men dancing and running through a forest. These aren’t images from a fever dream—they’re posts from Nutter Butter.
In recent years, the peanut-butter sandwich cookie brand has become known for sharing increasingly absurdist and intentionally low-quality-looking content on its social accounts, evolving from standard meme formats to deep-fried, sometimes unsettling posts with layers of brand lore beneath them.
Nutter Butter began its descent into madness on Instagram, where it now has around 287,000 followers, according to Zach Poczekaj, a senior social media manager at Dentsu Creative who works on the Nutter Butter account. But in the last year, it’s placed most of its focus on TikTok, where it now has more than 1.6 million followers. The Dentsu team that manages the brand’s accounts hosts weekly TikTok brainstorms to develop ideas for videos that have gone viral relatively consistently. For Nutter Butter, even a video of random images with someone saying “shoe” can generate millions of views.
The weirdness, it seems, is working. Before Nutter Butter started going off online, unaided awareness of the brand was low, Kelly Amatangelo, digital and social customer experience lead at parent company Mondelez International, said. Now, household penetration scores with Gen Z are up, as are awareness, relevancy, and brand equity scores—and that’s with strictly organic posts and a low creative budget, she said.
“We’re seeing people talking about the brand, and that was ultimately what we wanted,” Amatangelo told us.
Poczekaj told us that he attributes the brand’s online success to listening to customers and using their reactions to dictate everything from post ideas to character development.
“Strong emotion equals strong engagement equals strong love for your brand and your product,” he told us. “If you’re not making [audiences] feel anything, they’re not going to do much in the way of interacting with your brand.”
Character study
For Nutter Butter followers, the name Aidan should ring a bell. The now-ubiquitous character inspired by the name of a brand superfan who often commented on posts, was the first character introduced on the brand’s social media accounts. Since then, Nutter Butter has added more figures into its brand lore, like the spooky Nutter Butter Man and Aidan’s fellow cookie-headed figure Nadia, whose arrival created a viral moment for the brand last fall.
Nadia (which is “Aidan” spelled backwards) was born from one of the social team’s weekly TikTok brainstorms, Poczekaj said, but she, along with every other character in the Nutter Butter universe, was inspired by audience comments and theories.
“We were really just riffing off of that and giving them exactly what they were asking for,” he said. “It felt even more jarring to them when they saw their input baked back into the content the next week.”
Poczekaj said his team almost always tries to pair a concept for a post with an existing comment. A stray comment about wanting to buy Nutter Butters, for example, inspired an Instagram post featuring an image of a cash register slathered in peanut butter and full of the brand’s cookies.
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Engaging directly with followers and listening to Nutter Butter’s online audience has not only built rapport with existing fans and expanded the brand’s lore, but also led to more people discovering and engaging with the brand’s account, he said. According to Nielsen data from April, household penetration among Gen Z and Gen Y for the brand was up 15% year over year.
“I love when we get comments that say, ‘I did not realize this was the official account until I was 10 seconds into watching this video,’” Poczekaj said. “If we can almost camouflage ourselves into people’s Explore pages and For You pages, and then we can have our product be part of the story.”
Trial and error
While some brands may shy away from experimentation or unfettered posting, Mondelez prefers its social teams to run (relatively) free. “We’re not the creative experts, so we really need Zach and the team to be those creative experimenters,” Amatangelo said.
While Mondelez, like most brands, has some guardrails that content should adhere to, Amatangelo said there’s a sense of brand safety that exists in the escapist and absurdist world that Nutter Butter’s social team has created, which could end up being less risky compared to jumping on a trend that could go wrong.
Ultimately, she said, the less curated the content and more freedom given to the team, the better.
“You do want to blend in with everything else,” she said. “You stand out if you’re too polished—it just feels more like a produced spot.”
Amatangelo said part of the key to Nutter Butter’s success has been the social team’s spontaneity and flexibility, which makes real-time approval necessary. That approach makes it difficult to plan content far in advance, which can be both a blessing and a curse. Both Poczekaj and Amatangelo said there’s a chance that the brand’s online strategy may look very different in a few months depending on how audiences react and trends shift.
“We’re just going to go where their interests evolve,” Poczekaj said.
Brand camp
In addition to Nutter Butter, Poczekaj and his team at Dentsu manage the similarly outrageous accounts for Sour Patch Kids, another Mondelez brand. While Nutter Butter is “a cookie of few words” and does not comment on other brands’ posts, Poczekaj said, Sour Patch Kids’s account frequently does, and that brand has become an anticipated presence in the Nutter Butter comments section.
“[Commenters] will say, ‘Where is Sour Patch Kids?’ or, ‘Here before Sour Patch Kids,’” Poczekaj said.
Because Dentsu also manages the accounts for Mondelez brands including Oreo and Chips Ahoy, they can all build additional rapport for sister brands through inter-brand banter, Amatangelo said. Swedish Fish has also established a quirky brand persona online.
But even if they’re engaging with Nutter Butter content, absurdism isn’t the right strategy for every brand—especially those with what Amatangelo described as having more of a mainstream audience.
“A brand like Honey Maid Graham Crackers? “I don’t see them going into this strange world,” she said.