Dunkin Donuts Tests Facebook

Interesting interview by eMarketer recently with David Tryder, Manager Interactive & Relationship Marketing for Dunkin’ Donuts

A couple of interesting points from the Interview: 

eMarketer: Dunkin’ Donuts ran a two-day Facebook event in January. What was the purpose?

David Tryder: We ran a customer forum on Facebook around our menu of healthy menu items, DDSMART, the “better-for-you” products like egg white flatbread sandwiches, Latte Lite and multigrain bagels. The first of the year is when everyone is thinking about getting healthier and eating a little bit better, so it was the perfect time to talk to customers about DDSMART—find out how they use it, what they think of it and get suggestions for how we can make it better. In these times, when everybody’s marketing budget is tight, the Facebook program popped in our minds as a great, cost-effective opportunity. We have more than 370,000 brand fans on our Facebook page now. It was a great opportunity for us to test what I see as one of the great benefits of Facebook, which is that it’s a cost-effective way to get real-time feedback from real customers who want to talk to your brand and engage directly.

The interview does not say how many fans Dunkin Donuts had to begin with, but 370,000 fans is a huge number of engaged consumers. 

eMarketer: What did you learn from the two-day Facebook event?

David Tryder: What stands out is that customers are interested in engaging directly with the brand in a relevant and honest way. We got a lot of great feedback in the conversations about the DDSMART menu items—and customers liked the fact that we were there answering questions. Quite honestly, that’s not a big “Aha!” I mean, every brand wants to establish as close a relationship to its fans as it can—the question has always been how do you do that cost-effectively, in a meaningful way that doesn’t just look like more advertising?

This proved that we could do that. It was a first for us. We launched our Facebook page last year, but we had never taken a proactive stance to use it as a real engagement tool.

Could a social networking site like Facebook replace traditional market research? For a relatively small amount of money, Dunkin Donuts was able to reach 370,000 of its most valuable customers and get their feedback on a new menu item, all in a very short period of time.