How about a recipe for “The Best Flamin’ Hot Cheeseball made with CHEETOS?” Or how do 10-Minute Quaker Oats Air Fryer Cookies sound? Those are just a couple of the unexpected content that food lovers of all kinds will find on the FLVR TikTok page, which was inspired by the voyeuristic pleasures of #FoodTok and designed to re-spark the joy of food for the next generation of home cooks who are weary of push advertising.
PepsiCo Foods launched the FLVR TikTok channel in early 2023. In just six months, the channel reached 1 million followers and has grown into one of the biggest branded food entertainment communities on TikTok and the most-followed PepsiCo brand on the platform globally. Now also available on YouTube, Instagram, Amazon FireTV and online at www.fl-vr.com, the program features more than 1,750 TikTok-native pieces of content that speak directly to a Generation Z audience.
The experience of building and growing this unorthodox brand channel has inspired a few snackable insights that may help marketers in any industry who aim to accelerate growth and transform a brand without overtly selling to the target audience.
Go all-in on authenticity
With Gen Z spending an estimated 6.6 hours per day consuming media, it’s easy for them to tune out content they aren’t seeking out. Designed specifically as an antidote for push-based marketing fatigue, FLVR was designed to enhance our brands’ culinary credibility and expand beyond our core categories and consumption occasions.
Marketing professionals who want to pursue this strategy need to believe maniacally in their vision. You’ll need to put up an editorial firewall and stick to it. At PepsiCo, FLVR is an effective vehicle for the brands versus a vehicle being driven by our brands. Solicit recommendations and creative ideas from your brands but empower yourself with the final say in all content decisions. Once the platform has gone live, add social media performance data to your editorial meetings to help drive decisions and lean into what is resonating with your audience.
Organic co-creation beats pristine solo creation
To keep things authentic, we knew it was critical to populate the platform through co-creation with micro-influencers. That meant turning over the keys to the creators our target audience loves to watch. Consumers can spot inauthentic fakes in a flash, so for this strategy, the bigger payoff comes from taking bigger risks. We gave micro-creators open briefs to keep it organic by letting them develop their own content and voice. It’s an approach that has worked for other PepsiCo brands like Doritos Crash the Super Bowl and Lay’s Do Us A Flavor, and it works in part because we give control to the influencer while inspiring content that’s still on-brand. Snack products are often part of what consumers recall most fondly about some of life’s best – and messy – unplanned moments.
Keeping the fire going
As physical cookbooks have been essentially replaced by digital devices, the opportunity unlocked to extend the reach of the FLVR content to television. Rather than run campaigns in parallel on each type of media, we sought to elevate the FLVR strategy by bringing social content to Amazon’s FireTV. Consumers could watch videos from content creators and then order Frito-Lay products directly from Amazon. Expanding to this new platform continued to grow the FLVR audience, viewership, engagements and channels, especially among avid Gen Z home cooks.
When FLVR was launched, it provided PepsiCo brands “stretch beyond the salty aisle” and promoted new usage occasions. Now, it is an effective vehicle to promote away-from-home partnerships and maximize audience utility through authentic content.
We will continue to fuel our evergreen communities while finding new channels and ways to elevate the brand and content. This recipe for replacing perfect content from a marquee brand with perfectly imperfect content from a universe of creators and influencers can work for any marketer who needs to engage an audience fatigued by push content. The most important ingredient is the willingness to take calculated risks and turn over the keys to co-creators who likely know your audience best.
