The Social-First Series: The First Shift - Brand Reset.
Community Insights Now Drive Strategy, Not Just Support Campaigns.
Social Signals Redefine Strategy
Tumblr’s 2024 survey of 5,000 Gen Z respondents in the US found that 85% want brands to foster belonging. This isn’t a mood, it is a demand condition. For marketing teams, it means social data is no longer an afterthought but the starting point.
Product ideas, media spend, and partnership decisions now flow from what communities create and share in real time.
Heinz: Meme To Shelf In 48 Hours
The “seemingly ranch” meme exploded during the NFL season when Taylor Swift was spotted eating chicken with ketchup and ranch. Heinz monitored the spike, had packaging pre-approved, and shipped a ketchup-ranch blend within 48 hours. Circana reported a 13% lift in condiment category sales during the launch window.
This was not a stunt. It was supply-chain proof: brands equipped with agile approval and production pipelines can turn cultural signals into incremental sales.
Those without this setup cannot act at speed and lose relevance to smaller, more flexible competitors.
E.L.F. Cosmetics: Four Years Of Compounded Growth
From 2020 to 2024, Forbes confirms E.L.F. delivered a 38% CAGR, expanding market cap fivefold to $5.5 billion. The driver was social-first product innovation. Viral TikTok trends around skincare led to hydration creams and lip oils that expanded revenue mix, skincare rose from 10% to 17% of sales.
Collaborations with Chipotle and Dunkin’ embedded the brand in daily rituals, while campaigns like Eyes Lips Face generated billions of views. Community culture didn’t just inform comms; it set the pipeline.
The financial consequence proves scale: embedding social into the core of product development creates durable growth.
Comparative Stakes: Traditional Promotions Underperform In Feeds
The report states plainly that approaches which “look and feel like a traditional marketing promotion” won’t fly with social audiences. This is the penalty for pushing ATL-first work into social without re-engineering for native behavior: declining earned response and wasted spend. T
he operational gap is the point, six-month campaign calendars cannot keep pace with 24-hour culture.
What To Do Now: Rebuild Teams, Tools, and Cadence for Speed
The first Shift - Brand Building Reset. includes concrete actions.
First, invest in the toolsets, mindsets, and skillsets needed to drive a social-first shift across operations; this usually requires change management and training so teams can read cultural signals and act on them.
Second, start small to build momentum and secure buy-in, brief specific pods to prototype social-born “quick wins” your brand could credibly ship in days, not quarters.
Third, adopt a new playbook: if an idea behaves like a traditional promotion, redesign it for platform-native participation before it leaves the room. These are not platitudes; they are the minimum viable conditions behind the Heinz and E.L.F. cases above.
Bottom Line: Belonging is the Growth Filter of 2025
Brands that do not reorganize around community signals , with teams, tools, and approvals built for days not months, will spend more for less attention and erode pricing power. Heinz’s instant sell-out and E.L.F.’s four-year CAGR show the model that works; the rest doesn’t. .
