Halo Top's way to success!
- Vaishakh Gopalakrishnan
- Nov 29, 2021
- 3 min read
For those who might not know them yet, Halo top is a relatively new competitor in the ice cream market that has taken a very quick road to being one of the most popular and successful ice creams in the USA and has expanded to more than 25 countries including France. The founder and CEO, Justin Woolverton actually developed a healthy low sugar ice-cream for his own consumption and for his own dietary needs as he had to follow a hypoglycaemic diet. But this led to him thinking that this might have a mass appeal and there you go, a new brand was found, and it became a success really quick!
They were able to climb to the top so quickly due to their excellent marketing strategies that have also kept up with the digital age. As a new company, obviously they would not have the budget that Haagen-Dazs (they got Bradley Cooper to advertise their product), so yes, they relied a lot on social media. A lot of targeted ads from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram were used to increase visibility. Along with the targeted ads, they also relied heavily on influencer marketing as the main important marketing strategy. Their target audience could be narrowed down to include health-conscious adults, who would mostly be in the 20–30-year-old range.
Their strategy differed from usual in the sense that they were not targeting actual influencers who had a very huge audience, but rather smaller creators or influencers for whom they would not have to dish out a large sum of money. The parameters set for these smaller influencers were “Anyone who had at least 1,000 followers and got 100 likes a post and a couple of comments”. This way, they did not have to spend a huge sum of money, but since these were very small creators, it helped create a sense of belongingness and a very passionate fanbase. They would either send out free samples or give them discount codes which they could then distribute to their followers. Halo Top also gives huge importance to customer engagement by uploading a lot of videos which would be based on “adult” problems like mortgages, online dating and so on.
As part of expansion, they are also available exclusively at Monoprix, which also creates a sense of exclusivity which is tried and tested to produce results. Monoprix also gladly announced that halo Top is the third most sold ice cream brand in their stores, which is a huge deal considering all sorts of brands are sold in their supermarkets.
This strategy was slow but very effective as sales in 2016 were increased by almost 2500%. They currently have around 629,000 followers on their main account on Instagram and have even more followers in the regional accounts. Another way they gained traction was due to press articles. There was one article by Buzzfeed which compared them to Haagen-Dazs ice creams and concluded by saying “OMG.LIFE CHANGING”. They actually went on to surpass all the other major ice cream brands and ended up being the most selling ice cream brand in the US in 2017. In just 5 years ,this brand went from being worth only 1.5 million USD in 2013 to being worth approximately 2 billion USD in 2018.
Another example on how simple marketing strategies which are updated according to the times can lead to unimaginable success!
References-
https://econsultancy.com/how-halo-top-is-challenging-the-ice-cream-market-social-marketing-strategy/
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