Quaker Oats Leapfrogs to the #1 TotalSocial Food Brand, While Kellogg’s Falls Several Spots from #1 to #8 and Oreo Makes Its Top Ten Debut

NEW YORK, NY (September 21, 2017) – Americans love to talk about their food. In fact, “#Food” has been hashtagged on Instagram more than 235 million times alone. To help food marketers better understand the conversations taking place about today’s top food brands, both online and offline, Engagement Labs has released its TotalSocial® rankings on the top-performing food brands in the U.S. with respect to consumer conversations.

The report looks at how major food brands have performed socially over the past six months, and is a follow up to the Company’s first analysis of the top ranking food brands in March 2017. According to Engagement Labs’ report, three new food brands— Oreo, Perdue Chicken and Kraft—have made their debut in the top-ten TotalSocial rankings, while Heinz, Pillsbury and Nestlé have fallen off the top ten.

The analysis, which combines offline (face-to-face) and online (social media) consumer conversations, is based on Engagement Labs’ proprietary TotalSocial data, which continuously measures the most important drivers of brand performance in terms of social media and word of mouth conversations.

“Quaker Oats jumped several spots to become the top TotalSocial brand over the past six months. While the company remained stable with respect to offline consumer conversations, it was their online campaigns that catapulted to them to the top spot,” said Ed Keller, CEO of Engagement Labs. “Over the past six months, Quaker has given their online community a lot to talk about and share–from the launch of their 140th anniversary campaign to debuting innovative products such as single-serve Overnight Oats.”

Oreo, which was previously ranked #20, moved up to the third spot on the TotalSocial top-ten list. Within the past six months, the Company leapfrogged its competition to become a “Conversation Commander,” a brand that has above-average scores both offline and online. With such creative campaigns as #MyOreoCreation, the brand really focused on improving its online / digital performance over the past six months. As a result, online volume score increased by 25 percent, indicating that consumers are talking more about the brand via social media compared to six months ago. In addition, the company’s online brand sharing score, the amount of online conversations in which people are talking about a brand’s owned social media content, more than doubled.

Conversely, Heinz dropped in its TotalSocial ranking from #3 to #17. This drop stems from the decline in its online and offline sentiment score, indicating consumers are speaking negatively about the company in their face-to-face conversations and via social media mentions.

“The TotalSocial ranking should be a wake-up call for Heinz to rethink its marketing strategies,” commented Keller. “This significant drop in sentiment, combined with low offline volume scores, indicates that consumers aren’t talking about the brand and when they do, it isn’t positive. It’s time to add some spice to the condiment’s marketing strategy.”

To learn more about Engagement Labs or its TotalSocial insights, and how to increase your brand’s word of mouth in real life and online, reach out at: totalsocial@engagementlabs.com.

About Engagement Labs
Engagement Labs (TSXV:EL) is the world's first TotalSocial® company, offering intelligent data, analytics and insights for marketers. We are leaders in tracking, measuring and benchmarking the impact of conversations happening around a brand and industry – both online and offline. Consumer conversations are a proven driver of critical business outcomes, including sales. The patent pending TotalSocial data solution provides brands with unique insights and powerful analytics to understand online and offline social impact and drive business results. TotalSocial demonstrates to marketers how their online and offline conversation compare and contrast and helps identify areas of competitive opportunity or significant emerging threats. TotalSocial is an “always-on” proprietary scoring system, based on the most important drivers of brand performance: Volume, Sentiment, Brand Sharing and Influence. TotalSocial was built on the pillars of Engagement Labs’ patented social media measurement tool and the world’s only offline word of mouth tracking system for brands and tracks 500 brands within the U.S. across 17 major industry categories, and 350 brands in the UK.

To learn more visit www.engagementlabs.com / www.totalsocial.com.

For media inquiries please contact:
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For more information on TotalSocial™ or to request a demo, visit https://totalsocial.engagementlabs.com/

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