This week’s Walk Thru highlighted a carousel post by @eat_surreal that has been racking up hundreds of comments dripping with props for the marketers behind it.
In case you’ve never heard of the company, Surreal makes a high-protein, low-sugar breakfast cereal with flavors like “blueberry muffin” and “caramelized biscuit.” They’re based in the UK and sold in only 29 stores in North America, mainly on the East Coast.
So, if you’re in the U.S. or Canada, and a box of Surreal has never graced your kitchen cupboard (as of yet), you’d be excused.
But their viral apology post might just get you thinking about changing up your breakfast routine.
This week, Dustin Brohm, aka the “Massive Agent,” joined co-hosts Jason Cassity and The Broke Agent to discuss the marketing brilliance behind Surreal’s carousel.
Read on for some details and takeaways.
When a Marketing Mistake Inspires a Genius “Apology”
The first slide immediately got our attention:
“FORMAL APOLOGY REGARDING RECENT SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVITY”
Uh-oh. The second slide amps up the curiosity even more:
“One of our posts has been interpreted in a way we did not intend. We would like to apologize.”
Followed by:
“(And we’re using Times New Roman, so you know it’s gotta be deep doo-doo)”
That took the seriousness down a few notches. But the curiosity…still building.
The next slide gets down to it:
“Yesterday, at approximately 11:47 am, one of the idiots we employ posted the following:”
Wanna see? Check out the post below:
If you peeked, you now know why those hundreds of commenters (nearly a thousand, as I’m writing this) are demanding a raise for Surreal’s marketing team.
It’s that good.
So good that both of the companies referenced in the post took time to comment:
“The point with all this is if you’re a good writer and maybe you’re not as good on video, Codie Sanchez was saying this, you could do carousel posts like this that are basically fun little essay content where it’s like a little mini blog blog post in a carousel post. So, you don’t have to hook the audience in with an amazing video or visual. The amazing visual could be the thing that says, “Stop scrolling immediately. You need to look at this post.” Okay, now, I’m locked in. Let me see what’s going on. And you slowly pepper in the content throughout the entire post.
“I just thought that was a really good idea. And if you’re not great at video, you should be encouraged by this.”
Co-host Jason Cassity added that he did something similar for an invite to a Happy Hour, inserting jokes in a series of text-based posts. It crushed, racking up around 2,000 likes, which, as Jason said, was about twice the number of eyeballs he normally gets on his Stories.
Take a look for yourself (if you haven’t read the whole post yet) and leave a comment of your own. And if you love the cereal, as well as the marketing, be sure to let them know!
