Final Project

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SOCIAL MEDIA ROCKSTARS CONSULTING

A SPECIFIC PROPOSAL FOR JAMBA JUICE’S SUCCESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

UNIVERSITY WRITING 1020Zihan Yu

MAY 4,2015

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I. Executive Summary Jamba Juice has the capacity to change its current social media situation and achieve

an unprecedented success on social media, which will endow this company more

power to achieve its objectives of implementing social media which are targeting

specific audience and disseminating Jamba Juice’s brand value to a higher extent.

This proposal, created by Social Media Rockstars’ senior consulting team, lays out a

plan for several feasible improvements based on Jamba Juice’s current social media

presences. In examining Jamba Juice’s goal for providing customers with an easy

option to live healthy by offering nutrition beverage and snack options, this proposal

establishes an deliberate analysis for Jamba Juice’s target audience as young adults

and teenagers within the age of 15-34. Moreover, a few issues were noticed when our

team was making examination about Jamba Juice’s current campaign and they can be

classified into the following areas: 1.Infrequent use of social media. 2.Content lacks

pathos(elements of a sentence that appealed to any of an audience’s sensibilities). 3.

Lacks innovation for attracting the target audience. By analyzing other similar fast-

food industries’ behaviors of managing social media marketing, this proposal

provided some specific takeaways for Jamba Juice regarding their current issues and

are then put into practical terms in a comprehensive proposed campaign. This

proposed campaign concentrates on fixing the issues mentioned above, while also

offers strategies to increase customer interactions and balance out Jamba Juice’s core

value and social value as a whole(the goal of using social media), which will

ultimately make Jamba Juice a very strong and competitive company on the market.

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II. Introduction and Background As time passes by, social media has become more and more crucial for companies to

maintain their competitiveness among the market. It needs to be built into marketing

and consumer engagement process, and definitely has to be part of any successful

company’s future plans. In order to catch up and truly implement social media, certain

strategies such as the effective use of rhetorical appeals and the build of relationship

investment are required.

And that’s the reason why we are writing this proposal to you. We, as a senior

consulting team from Social Media Rockstars, want to help Jamba Juice better

handling the use of social media. As the editor for this team, I want to first introduce

the background of myself.

I am Zihan Yu and I graduated from The George Washington University’s School of

Business with a B.S. in Finance and a second major in Math 8 years ago. Right now I

am a senior consultant from Social Media Rockstars.

It is the most prestigious social media consulting firm in the United States. In 2013,

our firm took charge in social media strategy designing for the top three fast food

companies. They are McDonald’s, Subway and Starbucks, respectively. After these

companies implemented our strategies designed differently for each of them, their

financial positions had all improved after 2013. Comparing their financial reports

between 2012 and 2013, every of these three firms had at least 10% increase in its

annual net income. Although these companies’ own efforts on designing new products

are central to their improvements, our strategies of promoting are indispensable, too.

On the other hand, Jamba Juice’s financial performance is not optimistic. Due to our

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consulting team’s research, Jamba Juice witnessed declining financial performance

during 2014. The company’s total revenue decreased from $263 million in 2013 to

$226 million in 2014, a decline of 13.79%. But chanced to this severe circumstance, it

provided the right timing for Jamba Juice to make some changes. In order to

effectively help Jamba Juice getting rid of current circumstance, we reached out to the

CEO of Jamba Juice, James D. White, to better understand what struggling the

company. Based on the information we acquired from him, Jamba Juice is having a

hard time promoting their products. Because social media is a rapid rising marketing

tool (the reasons will be provided in the Case for Employing Social Media part of this

proposal), this difficult position Jamba Juice is facing gives social media an

opportunity to show its capability to reverse Jamba Juice economic downturn.

Based on our research, we have the confidence to say that Jamba Juice still has

substantial spaces to improve their social media campaigns and to attract young

customers more effectively if they can utilize social media in a more scientific way.

After analyzing Jamba Juice’s posts on Facebook,Twitter and Instagram, especially

for the parts of the posts’ rhetoric and intercommunication with users, we concluded

some shortcomings in Jamba Juice’s way of posting and created a detailed and

reasonable social media marketing plan for them to improve their campaign’s

competitiveness. Of course, our team’s efforts are not the whole part of this proposal.

We used a lot of scholarly researches to support and strengthen the suggestions our

proposal. We used a lot of references from social media specialists such as Hazem

Gaber, Len Wright,Bin Gu and Qiang Ye.

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If Jamba Juice could implement social media plan that Social Media Rockstars

proposed, it will have a more effective way to promote its products by attracting their

target audience and expanding their customer bases. Moreover, Jamba Juice will have

the ability to compete with higher-level competitors and ultimately fulfill its initial

goal of using social media: promoting products.

III. Audience Assessment

Jamba Juice is well-know for their healthy, all-fruit smoothies and their fun,

interesting flavor combinations. Jamba Juice established these planned characteristics

in order to attract their target demographics from 16 to 30 (Sarver, 2015) Moreover,

Sarver’s study for Jamba Juice also stated: “Jamba Juice wants to continue to reach

out to the young, creative middle class consumer. This consumer has a high

disposable income and they are single or newly married. They are just beginning their

lives as young adults. This younger demographic is interested in health and health

related products. They look for the healthy alternatives as a choice. (2014).”, so

Jamba Juice main target audience are the young demographics from 16 to 30 instead

of the elders and kids.

Although Jamba Juice’s main audience is the young adults, they strategically added

teens and kids into their target audience account because they are the potential main

consumers in the future. Morrison pointed out this shift in his recent article: “ Jamba

Juice is about to launch its largest marketing push yet, and it isn’t for a core menu

item– it’s for the kids’ menu.” (2013) In addition, James White, Jamba Juice’s

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president-CEO, said that the kids’ menu campaign is the “most comprehensive work

we’ve done arguably on any platform,” He also said that the company paired with

Disney because it was among the first of the media companies to adopt nutritional

guidelines for kids’, which it did in 2006. (Morrison, 2013) Also, as supported by Jeff

Fromm’s article, Jamba Juice has become a iconic youth brand by showing the

following characteristics: 1. Authenticity: Jamba Juice is uncompromising in its use of

fresh fruit and quality ingredients, despite cost and competitive pressures. 2. Effective

use of PR (PR, by definition, is the practice of managing the spread of information

between an individual or an organization): Until recently, Jamba Juice had never

made a TV commercial. Instead, it relies on great placement on shows like Dave

Letterman. 3.Innovative menu items: The addition of breakfast items gives customers

another reason to visit. 4. Consistently fun personality: Whether encountered Jamba

Juice on the web, on YouTube, or in the store, the attitude is fun and a little quirky. 5.

Simplicity: Jamba Juice isn’t trying to be all things to all people. In conclusion, Jamba

Juice’s target audience are mainly the young adults with the age from 16-30. But in

order to reach to the future market, it also strategically added kids as its secondary

audience.

IV. Case for Employing Social Media

In general. with the popularization of mobile devices such as phones, computers and

tablets, social media marketing has become a very powerful and vital tool for all

companies to improve their brand awareness and popularity in a way that no other

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platforms can accomplish. Moreover, this new way of marketing plays an

indispensable role for the success of fast food industry’s marketing goals, which are:

1.matching up with the target consumers. 2.maintaining and expanding the customer

bases.

Matching up with the target consumers

First of all, the popularization of social media and the prefect match-up of the

demographics between social media users and fast food consumers indicate that social

media has become a major marketing strategy for the fast food industry. A recent

figure shows that, Facebook, the most widely used social network world wide had

more than 1.23 billion users by the end of 2013 (The Guardian, 2014). That fact

represents a huge opportunity for fast food companies who search for innovative ways

of marketing rather than the traditional forms of advertising.

The identical demographics between fast food consumers and social media users

also shows strong evidence about social media’s dominance in fast food industry.

Time-saving, convenient take-aways produced by the fast food industry are deeply

favored by the office workers or college students who lack sufficient time to make

foods by themselves to sustain daily organic energy. A study from Angel Abcede gives

a more specific demographics for people who have high demand for fast foods. In the

study, he showed that, among American’s fast food chains, the customer’s age range

is 18-49 with about a 50-50 gender split (1994). This statistics of demographics also

provided a very strong implication about why social media marketing is essential and

prevailing among current fast food industry by its perfectly coinciding with the

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demographics of active social media users : in 2014, a study conducted by Pew

Research Center shows that, among America, 90% of the people with age from 18 to

29 use social networking sites and the percentage of using social media from 30-49 is

78%. This alignment between demographics of fast food consumers and social media

users demonstrated social media has become the primary avenue of communication

between fast food companies and consumers.

Maintaining customer bases

Both the consumers and the fast food industry chose social media as a way of

communication is never a coincidence. Besides the fact that advertising on social

media has a much lower cost comparing to other advertising tools, it is also social

media’s exceptional property of two-way communication which leads to its fast-rising

popularity. Traditional marketing-purpose tools, such as TV, radio, newspapers and

magazines, are all categorized as one-way communication. They provided which I

called passive information to the customers because the customers can only read or

watch the information passively without being able to present their own thoughts

about the information. Social media generated a rescue plan to this dilemma by

offering a platform for intercommunication between the fast food companies and the

customers. From this new era on, not only can fast food companies share information

with the customers, but also the customers are able to generate compliments,

suggestions, complains and concerns to the companies directly.

Furthermore, two-way communication will provide the fast food industries the

unparalleled opportunity to build customer satisfaction, loyalty, and word of mouth.

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When the fast food companies use social media to interpret and address proper

feedback to customers’ questions, they are actively participating in providing

customer service. Through this service, an unique type of investment, which is called

the relationship investment, has been accrued. Relationship investment, by definition,

is the “seller’s investment of time, effort, spending, and resources focused on building

a stronger relationship”(Palmatier, Dant, Grewal, & Evans, 2006) Customers will

sense and recognize this investment and respond appropriately with engagement

through social media channels. As supported by the interpersonal relationship

marketing theory which states, “ people feel grateful when others have contributed to

them and respond by rewarding extra efforts.”, this positive intercommunication will

finally lead to customers’ satisfaction and loyalty towards the fast food companies

(the interpersonal relationship theory was cited by Mr. Palmatier in his article:

“Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Relational Marketing: A Meta-Analysis.” ).

Thus, the goal of maintaining customer bases has achieved.

Expanding customer bases

Moreover, fast food companies can take advantage of social media by generating

positive Word of Mouth (WOM). WOM, by definition, is the dissemination of

information (e.g., opinions and recommendations) through communication among

people (Chen, Wang, &Xie 2011). It is an increasingly important area for fast food

companies since consumers generally trust personal sources more than non-personal

sources such as advertising. With the active engagement with consumers, as a recent

study finds that, up to 87% of individuals indicated they had made a purchase based

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on a recommendation given in a blog, over 60% bought based on a recommendation

on Facebook (Collins, 2012) This evidence strongly indicates that the fast food

companies’ goal of expanding customer bases can not survive without the use of

social media.

V. Competitive Research Overview

Jamba Juice confronts competitions on social media from a variety of fast food

companies. In order to give the most effective advice to Jamba Juice, we’ve picked up

two other companies’ ( McDonald and Chipotle) which have relatively better

performances than Jamba Juice on social media and analyzed their advantages over

Jamba Juice. These companies’ successes on social media are vital models for Jamba

Juice’s developments in social media marketing.

McDonald

McDonald is the leading character in fast-food field. They have over 18,000

restaurants over globe. Also, McDonald is the largest American-based fast-food-

chains. Their effective social media strategies are essential to run McDonald’s global

success.

1. Affinity

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The picture above shows a McDonald’s typical post. In the post, McDonald’s stated:

“Good mornings start with freshly cracked eggs. #EggMcMuffin.”. The tone in this

post is not so exciting or sharply trying to promote their products. In many other

McDonald’s posts, customers also could barely see a exclamation mark or uppercase

letters trying to attract people’s eyes. This amiable tone gives the audience a feeling

that the posts were made by some friend instead of profit-seeking company.

Thus, a special atmosphere was created by McDonald. Our team would like to call it

“affinity”, since there are no strong call to actions or strong verbs appear in

McDonald’s posts, instead of pathos. Other companies may be anxious about how to

promote their sales or reputations. But McDonald is more focused on being a friend

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with the customers on social media. The affinity of being the audiences’ friend and

the credibility of McDonald itself as the world’s largest fast food chains constructed

its affinity style of posting. Exactly due to this kind of style does McDonald’s attract

more and more young audience. McDonald’s success based on affinity also gives

Jamba Juice an inspiration that, thinking outside out the rhetorical appeals (logos,

ethos, pathos) is worth trying too.

2. Strong rhetorical appeals( pathos, ethos)

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While affinity has helped McDonald to gain huge success on social media,

McDonald also knows that strong rhetorical appeals are the key to living on social

media. The picture above provided an example of how McDonald created the

rhetorical appeals on social media.

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In the post, it asked a engaging question: “Curious about the freshly cracked eggs

that makes our Egg McMuffin so good? “. By using this question, it stimulate a strong

pathos in people’s heart. People who like the Egg McMuffin, or more broadly, people

who realized McDonald’s brand awareness, are tantalized by this free opportunity of

watching how the world’s biggest fast food industry make their product.

Moreover, the post provides another pathos by using a friendly and amiable tone.

For example, the post stated : “Have more questions? Go ahead and ask! We’re here

to answer.” The sincere attitude gives people an impression of “Although McDonald’s

is such a huge company, it still shows solicitude for every single customers.This

attitude is beyond dispute”.

The ethos here is the video’s content. Basically, the video showed a factory of

McDonald’s and how it convey raw materials of Egg McMuffin to the stores, with a

process of how to make those Egg McMuffins. This video established trustworthiness

between the customers and McDonald’s by providing the real food-making process.

And let people be at ease about the quality of their foods. Thus, as mentioned before

in this proposal, an relationship investment has occurred.

3. Interaction with the audience

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McDonald gained a global success for reasons. One of the prominent reason is that,

as mentioned in the Case for Employing Social Media, their understanding of the

advantage of social media over other traditional advertising tools such as the TV

commercials or magazines’ advertisements. The most significant advantage of social

media is that it allows two-way communication between customers and companies.

Not only companies can convey messages to the customers, but also can customers

express their compliments, complains or concerns to the companies. The use of social

media can be regarded as a success only when companies are able to use this

advantage to communication with customers on social media. McDonald is one of

them. As shown in the picture above, McDonald’s responding frequency is very high

and their responding contents are very specific to each of the customers. Moreover,

they also designed a feedback page for customers to provide their suggestions for

McDonald (feedback page will be provided in more details in the Proposed

Campaign). With these careful efforts on social media, the relationship investment on

the customers has strengthened. Thus, the target customers bases are very loyalty to

McDonald.

Chipotle Mexican Grill

Chipotle is a rising star among the fast food companies. Because their products, such

as the burritos, are easy to carry about, they are very popular with the younger people.

Moreover, their effective use of social media undoubtbly forms a big contribution to

their success.

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1. Using innovation to gain credibility

The picture listed above is a screenshot of Chipotle’s animation, “The Scarerow”.

This video shows the dark side of the food industries.The farmers gave injections of

growth hormone to the chickens in order for them to growing faster and bigger. And

the purpose for torturing this chicken is to meet the growing demand for chicken

wings.In here, Chipotle used logos. By providing other anonymous companies brutal

punishment to the chickens, Chipotle appears to let the audiences thinking whether

the punishments for the chickens is derived from them.

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Then the animation goes to a scene with the scarecrow(leading character) abandoned

his own job as a cleaner for crimes and start off with a new factory of his own. The

materials he used were almost handmade and contained rice, tomatoes, black soya

beans, with little chicken and other meat.

So actually this video not only established a dark side of some food industries but

also created the image of a bright and healthy company. The company is obviously

Chipotle itself. This part of the video used a pathos approach to the audiences who felt

guilty, pathetic about the livestock or want to live a healthier life with non-additive

foods.

In addition to pathos, we concluded Chipotle also used a ethos here. Chipotle gave

audiences credibility through the way it presenting this post. Based on our

experiences in the social media marketing field, not many food companies could do

fine animation advertisement like this.Chipotle wants to show the audiences its ability

to make profits(otherwise it would not be able to make the animation).So the

credibility,or trustworthiness,was developed by Chipotle ingeniously.

2. Cultivate Festival

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Chipotle has its own festival for the customers. As shown in the picture, this festival

provided “ FOOD, IDEAS & MUSIC”. By offering this festival, Chipotle shows its

extra efforts to benefit the audience. So this post generated satisfaction in the

customers’ minds due to Chipotle’s investment of spending and resources. This might

sound familiar because we have mentioned this type of investment from the analysis

of McDonald’s successful social media campaigns. So the focus of building

relationship investment on social media is a vital element for the successful use of

social media.

VI. Critique of Current Campaign

Although Jamba Juice’s efforts on social media are obvious to all, some of Jamba

Juice’s efforts could be changed to make its social media campaign more successful.

In this section, we will analyze which areas of Jamba Juice’s current campaign are not

effective. Understanding these current issues can benefit Jamba Juice’s future use of

social media.

Low responding frequency to the audience During our team’s observation over Jamba Juice’s social media campaigns in the

past few months, one significant problem lies within it is the low rate of responding to

the customers. Since social media is a two-way communication tool, it provides a

prefect environment for Jamba Juice to exchange information with the customers, and

Jamba Juice must grab this natural advantage of social media over the other

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traditional communication tools to optimizing its usage of social media. The

following two pictures could help Jamba Juice to see the problem more clearly:

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The picture on the left hand side is from McDonald’s while the other is from

Jamba Juice. Noticed that, McDonald’s responded to the customers very patiently

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regardless the length of customers feedback. But Jamba Juice did not made timely

responses to the customers, which may potentially decrease the enthusiasm for

customers to interact with Jamba Juice in the long run. Just as Bryden McGrath

said, “Sometimes just acknowledging a post can make someone’s day-potentially

making that person loyal to your brand for a lifetime. If you take the time to post,

take the time to respond to complaints, compliment and questions in a timely

manner.” (2013). In order to eliminate this hidden danger, Jamba Juice should

improve their rate of responding. It might sound easy to improve the frequency of

responding to customers. But the actual work needs a more detailed plan which

will be covered in the Proposed Campaign of this proposal.

Lack of Pathos

Pathos is also known as pathetic appeal. It referred to the elements of a social media

presence that appealed to any of an audience’s sensibilities. Jamba Juice’s current

campaigns are lack of pathos because the elements being created in its campaigns are

not carefully designed to attract all the younger demographic. In this section, we will

present 3 examples in Jamba Juice’s daily posts which lack of pathos.

1.

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As shown in the picture above, this post is a typical one which lacks pathos. In the

post, it stated that:” Apple Pay is now available at Jamba Juice! It’s an easy, secure

and private way to pay on your iPhone 6.”

The content in this post clearly demonstrated the intended audience for this post are

those who are using iPhone 6 right now. As a consequence, the purpose for this post is

obvious: it tries to show that iPhone 6 users have priority to pay in Jamba Juice

because the post specially mentioned iPhone 6 and even has named the new paying

method as “Apple Pay”. Thus, Jamba Juice only used pathos among the iPhone 6

users. It forgot to use pathos for the non-iPhone 6 users.

This lack of pathos is the problem within, the post overstated the priority of the

iPhone 6 users. For people using other types of phones, it neither mentioned other

phones nor gave a specific time when Jamba Juice would offer special payments for

them. So for the users on Facebook who don’t have an iPhone 6 while viewing this

post, it is hardly a intriguing post. If the content was not so iPhone-oriented, this post

will receive a better outcome.

2.

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In most of the cases, the contents within Jamba Juice’s posts were just like the ones

contained in the example above. In this example, Jamba Juice used a insipid tone to

convey its messages to the customers. As a result, the sense of pathos received by the

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audience was quite low and, from the picture, you can see the Likes and Comments

from the audience was not ideally high enough.

Moreover, Jamba Juice often used strong verbs like “Introducing”, “Prepared” to

start its social media campaigns. This pattern of posting is very similar to the “work

experience” part of a resume. The reason of mentioning resume here is that, Jamba

Juice’s realization of the similarity between creating social media campaigns and

resumes demonstrated it has already sensed the importance of time-management on

social media. Audience won’t spend more than 15-20 seconds to view a resume. For

one single post or tweet, the time must be even shorter. With this already thoughtful

time-management, what Jamba Juice could do better is to create more pathos within

the limited time span. And more details will be present in the Proposed Campaign part

of this proposal.

3.

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As shown in the picture above, the intended audiences for this post are the ones

interested in the football game because Jamba Juice provided opportunities for gift

cards to the people who leave comments about which team they are rooting for.

Pathos was used there. But it was not strong enough. The post then stated that there

are only 5 $10 gift cards. It is hard to convince people to engage in a activity when

they know their chance of winning is very low.

Not surprisingly, when I viewed the comments below the posts, users actually did

not care about the gift cards,instead, they were more focus on Patriots and Seahawks.

And our team came up with a conclusion about why this post failed: it is inappropriate

to associate with a popular/hot topic or activity without offering convincing benefits

(i.e., strong pathos) for the customers.

Overrate the importance of core value

As a senior social media consulting team, we have already seen a lot of fast food

companies which lack the ability of distinguishing social value from core value.

Jamba Juice had this problem, too. But if Jamba Juice can understand the essential

distinction between these values, then the problem is totally solvable.

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A core value of a fast-food company is a guideline for producing its products. For

Jamba Juice, its core value of the products are “healthy”, “great-tasting”, “nutritious”.

But it is important to note that, solely depended on demonstrating the core value isn’t

enough to attract the audience. Jamba Juice, as shown in the pictures above, had

overrated its core values on social media because it posted a lot of healthy-related

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contents and pictures in the post few months. Audience initially followed Jamba Juice

on social media avenues were because of this brand’s distinguishing features such as

fresh and nutritious, which are also known as the core values. But, from the audience

perspective, they are more willing to see novel contents other than Jamba Juice’s

emphasizing on its core value on social media. So the use of social media to attract

company’s target audience and expand its customer base, which is what we called the

social value, should be focused more by Jamba Juice instead of focusing on its core

value. The intrinsic character of social media provided in the next paragraph will help

Jamba Juice better understand the importance of social value.

Social media is ultimately a form of advertising: companies make free fan page on

social network and the managers of these fan pages can keep posting on these fan

pages news about their brands with the aim of keeping and expanding the customer

bases. Also, it allows the advertisers( e.g. Jamba Juice.) place advertisements that

appears on the sides of the profile page of social media users or on their home

Facebook page. As a form of advertising, social media is important because the

advertiser can customize his advertisement to appear only to his target market on their

social media page.( Gaber, 2014) This advantage in social media advertising makes

the advertising efforts more targeted to the prospective customers.

From social media’s ultimate function as a advertising tool, Jamba Juice needs to

realize that solely showing its core values on social media is not the right way to use

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social media. In order to achieve the social value of using social media, Jamba Juice

must use more tactics to attract audience.

Infrequent use of Twitter

Based on our team’s observations, Jamba Juice’s average frequency of using Twitter

is 3 times per day. But this frequency is not high enough attract the target audience on

Twitter. Instead of talking about the ideal frequency of using Twitter (which will be

presented in the Proposed Campaign part of this proposal), we want to first explain

why Twitter worth Jamba Juice’s investment.

Twitter, instead of the world’s largest social media platform Facebook, takes the top

position of advertising in mobile. Current study shows that, Twitter’s relatively later

filing of IPO (Initial Public Offering) comparing with Facebook, is much better than

Facebook’s, because mobile ads conveniently are just now emerging as a major

revenue source for companies rely on the Internet (Shalvey, 2013). Twitter’s coming

out at a time when mobile adoption is prevailing gives it a timing advantage over

Facebook.

Besides the timing advantage, the differences in the way users interact on the two

networks also gives Twitter an edge. Facebook is a more “social focused” platform,

where users mostly are following family and friends. Twitter users, on the other hand,

follow lots of news and brands. That can make it easier for advertisers to target a

premium audience with pertinent ads. Another factor in ad sales is that Facebook is a

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closed network. Users have to register and sign in to view any of the site. Twitter’s

site is open to all, who can view any content that tweeters haven’t made private. So,

Twitter can serve ads to people who aren’t even users (Shalvey, 2013). Based on all

these advantages Twitter over Facebook, Jamba Juice must consider using Twitter

more to achieve a broader customer bases.

VII. Proposed Campaign

Jamba Juice’s overall performances on social media avenues are promising. It has

already reached the fundamental value of implementing social media (which is the

value of expanding brand awareness): the company is now well-known for their

healthy, all-fruit smoothies and their fun interesting flavor combinations. But other

than the fundamental value, its social value of using social media, which is the value

of maintaining and expanding customer bases, does not reach its desired result

currently. In order to reach its social value of using social media, Jamba Juice needs

some adjustments to increase its social media’s traffic. While the adjustments are

essential, they are accessible and reachable.

1. Relationship investment

Companies’ goal of creating social media pages on Facebook or other social media

avenues is not building relationships with their own employees. They created these

pages because they want to leave impressions on the intended audience. Jamba Juice

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is not an exception of this goal. "Social media is rapidly emerging as the next big

frontier for customer engagement and interaction," said Mr. Nitin Bhat, Partner &

Head of Consulting, Frost & Sullivan. " Millions of customer interactions take place

every day on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, besides

other customer support forums and online communities. Therefore, it has become

imperative for companies to possess a sound social media customer engagement

strategy." With the rapid rising of social media, it has become a vital and

indispensible element for companies as part of their marketing plan. Jamba Juice can

use social media better by strengthening its relationship investments on the target

audience with some practicable changes.

Increase responses to customers

Due to people’s the high rate of using social media nowadays, sometimes comments

received by just one single post could be innumerable. For this time being, Jamba

Juice has to consider which comments it should answer deliberately and which ones

could be answered with less time. Our team’s plan suggested that Jamba Juice can

improve their response quality by implementing the keywords-filter in the browsers

more. With the comments contain positive keywords such as “delicious”,

“tasty”,“love”,“ healthy”,etc., for example, Jamba Juice can respond with a general

and passionate pattern such as this ideal one our team came up with: “Our customers

are the heart of our business. You are the reason we exist. We dedicate to provide the

most healthy and fresh food for our customers because every one of the customers

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matters to us. Your positive feedback for Jamba Juice’s product is the ultimate

fountain of our motive power!” The reason of having a general pattern for customers’

positive feedbacks is that, firstly these positive feedbacks demonstrated certain

customers don’t have issue with Jamba Juice’ services or products, and their

confidence and loyalty with Jamba Juice is high enough, so a response with shaped

enthusiasm will provide enough satisfaction for them. Second, time waits for no one.

A recent study from Wisemetrics shows that Facebook posts reach their half-life at

the 90-minute mark and 75 percent of its potential in the first 5 hours. They also

found that 24 minutes was the median engagement point for Twitter and 90 minutes

for Facebook. (Lee, 2014) According to this study, the best timing for engagement

with customers in major social media avenues is within one hour and a half after

Jamba Juice post something new.

Here, Jamba Juice faces a trade-off because there are negative feedbacks as well as

the positive ones. It has to decide which kind of feedback should it respond first. The

choice of which one should be responded first involves determining the influence

between two kinds of feedback. And this task had been done by Michel Hersen as far

back as 1967. In his study of determining whether the experimental induction of

response biases is a function of positive and negative wording, he founded that

although verbal conditioning conducted with positively worded statement transfers

reliability to negatively worded statements, the negative wording in the test series has

a suppressing effect on performance.

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Since Mr. Hersen’s study emphasized negative wording has a stronger influence than

the positive, Jamba Juice should take the limited responding time to deal with the

complaints first. It is also necessary to mark that the tone of responding should be

sincere, patient and enthusiastic. An ideal responding should be like this: “ Hi. We’re

really sorry to hear about this. Can you provide the location in this link:(providing the

link of the feedback page here.) so we can address this?” (feedback page will be

provided with more details in this proposal).

Create humor to make your followers laugh

In the critique part of this proposal, we had pointed out that the lack of pathos

contained in Jamba Juice’s current campaign is in need of fixing. A feasible solution

for intensifying pathos is to use more humor in future campaigns. One current study

shows that humor positively influences attitudes toward an ad and the brand that this

ad promotes in stereotyped advertising, particularly if nontraditional stereotyping

rather than traditional stereotyping is utilized.(Eisend, 2014) Since social media is a

tool of selling, just like an ad, the necessity of using humor on social media is not

neglectable, too.

Old Spice gives an good example of using humor on social media. A tweet from it

stated, “ A heart full of chocolates makes a great gift, as long as it’s actually just a

cardboard box in a heart shape. This last part is important.”(2014). The quirky pattern

of its campaigns enabled Old Spice shines through on Twitter as well as other social

media avenues. Thus, Old Spice received certain extent of success on social media.

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Jamba Juice can reach this level of success on social media if it is willing to generate

more humor-oriented campaigns. This social media tactics’ shift will require Jamba

Juice to gather more information about its target audiences because only those humors

relate to people’s real life would be the most effective ones to attract them. Since

Jamba Juice target audience are young adults and the teens. It can design amusing

anecdotes such as embarrassing moment of an interview, or generating funny GIF

moves of high school students during the class break to show it does go through some

hard thinking to collect information about its audience. Thus, the target audience will

feel they are highly valued and be more willing to interact with Jamba Juice.

Design a feedback page

In previous section, we mentioned the term, feedback page,in the ideal response for

customers’ complains. Now we want to present this term with more details.

First, it must be clarified that feedback page is not a innate element of social media.

But due to its importance in increasing interaction with customers, we specifically

added this section to improve Jamba Juice’s competitiveness on social media.

A feedback page is a website created by a certain fast food company to collect

customer’s complains or comments during their time in the restaurant,and also the

personal information from the customer (in order to contact the customer). An

proposed feedback page for Jamba Juice should provide the following information for

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customer to fill : 1. Restaurant Address 2. City 3. Date of visit 4. Comments regarding

your visit 5. Personal Information (e.g. Name, address, city, contact number).

With the help of this page, Jamba Juice can improve interaction with two distinct

group of customers. For those who leaves a compliment, their good opinion towards

Jamba Juice will be strengthened because Jamba Juice’s thoughtful design of this

page. A feeling of intimacy will be sensed by the customers and then this sense will

transfer to credibility (ethos) in customers’ heart. So this page can create a long-term

loyalty among these customers towards Jamba Juice. For those who leaves a

complain, the feedback page will act like an air cushion. Because when customers

were very angry about the last customer services or Jamba Juice’s products, this page

will cushion their negative feelings by providing this online, positive customer

service. Thus, a sense pathetic appeal (pathos) is created in customers’ mind.

In conclusion, the creation of feedback page is necessary for Jamba Juice because it

can reduce dissatisfaction and strengthen loyalty among the customer bases.

2. Strengthen social value but not core value on social media

As illustrated in the critique part of this proposal, Jamba Juice overrated the

importance of spreading its core value in its past posts. So that the social value, which

is the goal of using social media to maintain and expand customer bases, has been

weakened. In order to maximize the use of social media, Jamba Juice must adopt new

social media avenue to expand influences of the social value. The following

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innovations, which are specifically focused on Twitter, will help Jamba Juice to

achieve this goal.

Increase the use of Twitter

From the Critique part of this proposal, we have stated that two of Twitter’s

advantages over Facebook: 1. Twitter’s coming out at a time when mobile adoption is

prevailing. 2. Facebook is a more “social focused” platform, where users mostly are

following family and friends. Twitter users, on the other hand, follow lots of news and

brands. That can make it easier for advertisers to target a premium audience with

pertinent ads.

Thus, Jamba Juice must treat Twitter seriously in order to generate more proceeds

from using social media.

Advertising on Twitter

As mentioned previously, social media is a form of advertising that companies can

make free fan page on social network, and the managers of these fan pages could keep

posting on these fan pages news about their brands with the aim of keeping and

expanding the customer bases. We have reached out to the improving of advertising,

in general, in the previous sections. Here, specifically aimed at Twitter, we will

provide more feasible suggestions for Jamba Juice.

Let people know who’s tweeting

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Jamba Juice often used strong verbs like “Introducing”, “Get” to start its Twitter

campaigns. This way of starting is very similar to the “work experience” part of a

resume as we stated previously. Although it might make the tweet look concise and

rigorous, it also inevitably conveys a sense of stiff to the audience. Jamba Juice could

solved this dilemma by making its Twitter page a little more human.

By making the page a little more human, we mean that Jamba Juice can include the

initials of the person tweeting at the end of each tweet or include the Twitter handle of

the person tweeting in their biography. The picture below is a typical human tweet

created by TIME. Noticed that TIME Twitter account includes information on who is

authoring the account’s tweets in the biographical section. Jamba Juice can make the

same pattern of biographical presence to create more humanity. Moreover, Jamba

Juice could include the name of the person tweeting. For example, when Jamba Juice

makes a tweet with fine pictures in the future, it could state “Inspiring? This fantastic

picture was designed by XXX(type the creator of the pictures here)!” in the end of

that tweet.

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Although this change is very easy and tiny, it is indeed essential and indispensable.

By creating a little more humanity and making the interactions more personal, this

change will give Jamba Juice a better handle of utilizing pathos on Twitter.

Increase the frequency of using Twitter

Based on our team’s observations, Jamba Juice’s frequency of using Twitter is 3

times per day. Although this frequency of posting is higher than Jamba Juice’s

frequency on Facebook, it is still not the qualified as the ideal frequency for

maximum customer engagement.

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We drew this conclusion based on the statistics from Track Social. Track Social, a

leading company in analyzing for Engagement Optimization, had conducted an

analysis for the optimal frequency of implementing Twitter in 2014. The picture

above was a graphical outcome derived from that analysis, which took a random

sample of 11,000 tweets produced by top brands. Basically, what this chart illustrated

is that the more you tweet, the more opportunities you have to engage with fans, and

the more total response you will receive. And the takeaway here would be in

observing the spikes, when responses jumped at different volumes of tweets. Spike #1

occurred around 5 tweets per day, Spike #2 at 11-15 tweets, and Spike #3 at 21-30

( Lee, 2014). Since customers’ engagement difference (the red line) is not distinct

between Spike #1 and Spike #2, increasing the frequency of twittering from 5 times

per day to 11-15 times per day is not really beneficial. So the final choice is between

tweet 5 times per day or 21-30 times per day.

Both of these frequencies are promising to bring traffic to Jamba Juice’s Twitter

page, yet their functions are varied. If Jamba Juice want to wring the most value out

of every tweet, tweet about five times each. If Jamba Juice want to wring the most

value out of its Twitter presence as a whole, tweet up to 30 times per day. Our

suggestion is that, since Jamba Juice is currently a rising business which requires a lot

of time to design new products and make expansion plan instead of tweeting 20+

tweets per day, tweeting five times per day is a better option. Adhering to the 5 tweets

per day frequency, Jamba Juice will get the maximum bang from its limited efforts.

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3. Conclusion

Social Media Rockstars’ assigned its elite team to design this proposal for a reason.

Based on Jamba Juice’s objectives and the innate character of social media, our

team’s proposed campaign for Jamba Juice will provide Jamba Juice a more scientific

and engaging way to manage their social media presence. Through the process of

managing, Jamba Juice will maximize its proceeds of using social media (its social

value), which are the goals of maintaining and expanding its customer bases. This

proposed campaign will finally lead Jamba Juice to be a professional of selling with

social media.

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“Frost&Sullivan:Social Media the Next Big Frontier for Customer Interaction.” NewsRX. (2014):155. ProQuest. Web. 12 Apr 2015.

Old Spice (OldSpice). “A heart full of chocolates makes a great gift, as long as it’s actually just a cardboard box in a heart shape. This last part is important.” 13 Feb . 2014, 10:26 a.m. Tweet.

Lee, Kevan. “The Social Media Frequency Guide: How often to Post to Facebook,Twitter, LinkedIn And More.” Buffersocial. 7 Apr, 2014. Web. 12 Apr, 2015

Hersen, Michel. “Experimentally Induced Response Biases As a Function of Positive and Negative Wording.” American Psychological Association. 74.1 (1967): 588-590. EBSCO. Web. 12 Apr 2015.

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Sedghi, Ami. “Facebook: 10 years of social networking, in numbers.” Technology Datablog. The Guardian. 4 Feb, 2014. Web. 30 Apr, 2015

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Collins, J. “Women in Social media in 2012.” BlogHer. 12 March, 2012. Web. 30 Apr, 2015.

Shalvey, Kevin. “Twitter Better Than Facebook In Mobile? Microblogging giant will go public just as ads on the go take off.” Investor’s Business Daily. (2013): A01. ProQuest. Web. 4 Apr 2015.

Sarver, Josh. “Jamba Juice Design and Campaign”, Slideshare. 04 Jun, 2009. Web. 17 Mar, 2015.

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