One idea has been the separation point between creator brands that flourish or fade: Customer Experience. Like many talent-led brands, Feastables has had an already energized and widely distributed audience base since its inception.
$10 million in e-commerce sales is an achievement that only a small percentage of digitally native brands will ever reach. Feastables self-reported that revenue number less than four months under operations – immediately catapulting itself into conversations around the world’s fastest-growing brands.
With so much press coverage around MrBeast, himself, there remain to be many questions about Feastables as a separate stand-alone business and the prospects of establishing itself as a long-term viable company.
CelebrityPackagedGoods sat down with Jess Cervellon, head of Customer Experience at Feastables, to learn about how the team is building one of the most robust customer experience programs in the industry. Everything Feastables does begins with the question of loyalty in the mind.
Customer Experience. While the growth playbook for digitally native brands evolves, the role of customer experience continues to have a bigger chapter written about it. As we explore organizational structure across talent-led brands, the vast majority of teams lack any investment in a formal customer experience program – and instead, allocate most of their human capital resources to support their talent in driving new customer acquisition.
Feastables was founded alongside long-time industry veteran, Jim Murray, who formerly served in leadership for Pepsico and was most recently the President of RxBar. Having joined the RxBar team in 2016, he’s had a front-row seat in one of the most explosive brands of our generation.
To recreate similar successes at Feastables, he understood the value of investing in a perfect end-to-end customer experience from day zero. Jess Cervellon was brought onto the team as employee #4 to lead the charge on this front.
While MrBeast receives most of the press coverage for his involvement in the business, customer experience has been the lifeblood of Feastables.
Just Chocolate. The United States chocolate industry is estimated to be valued at roughly $32 billion with a projected growth rate of 4%. However you slice it, the market falls in the category of one of the most commoditized industries in the world. Legacy players like Mars & Hersheys have been fighting over the same slice of the pie for decades.
No winners will emerge on the basis of product quality alone. For Feastables, it’s clear MrBeast is the innovative acquisition channel moat. What the team realized early on was that would not be enough – they needed to retain their customers.
Entertaining Customers. Most customers come to Feastables because they love MrBeast. Instead of shopping for chocolate bars, they are writing customer support tickets asking to participate in YouTube videos or win money from the brand.
Jess shares, “In the early days most of our customer support tickets had nothing to do with Feastables. We had to connect the dots between the two.”
Instead of writing off these support tickets as “unrelated to the business,” Jess saw things differently. She saw an additional touchpoint with MrBeast’s fanbase.
“Fans follow MrBeast for entertainment” Jess wondered, “so, why don’t I make it entertaining for them to be a customer?”
So, she did.
Feastables now has a chatbot on its website, but instead of serving as a way to answer questions about the brand, it was designed to entertain.
“Our customers are chatting with the bot as if it is Jimmy (MrBeast). I started testing randomness pathways where the bot is now exchanging jokes, sharing random memes, telling random stories about Feastables, or offering a MrBeast factoid,” Jess explains.
The most incredible part is that customers are coming back to the website just to interact with the bot and stay updated with the latest jokes. Jess is working around the clock to keep content in the chatbot fresh and unique.
Integrating the ability to purchase or recommend products as part of this experience has been a unique sales driver for the brand that no other competitor would be able to unlock in the same way.
The Feastable customer experience would have to emulate more of a marketing function than it would at a different brand.
Retail. Feastables has not only had tremendous success through its DTC channel, but the brand has also partnered with Walmarts across the country.
So how does customer experience scale to wholesale operations?
What makes the Feastable customer experience program different than that of nearly every high-growth CPG brand, is that the team sees it as a brand experience function. At its core, the fundamental insight Jess had still holds true: the beginning of their customer journey starts with MrBeast and his videos.
Feastables is a unique market where its buyer and customer are two different people.
Parents are the ultimate buyer of the product. It’s significantly more difficult to communicate who MrBeast is online because Feastables can directly link to his YouTube videos or interviews, etc, but that is largely not possible in stores.
So, yes – parents might purchase Feastables once to satisfy their child’s craving, but getting them to repurchase is the goal.
Jess shares, ”What we learned was many parents had never heard of us or even MrBeast. When it comes to retail, we have a small window to help parents understand who MrBeast is and why their kid is begging to try his chocolate bar.”
Feastables has added QR codes to all of their products – but not for the reason we might assume. Most CPG brands attempt to redirect retail traffic back to their website for customer data capture.
However, instead of attempting to redirect traffic to the website to incentivize the next purchase, Feastables attaches their QR codes to a gamified version of its website to explain who MrBeast is. The QR codes often lead to landing pages for exclusive games and information about MrBeast’s content.
Silver Lining. What Jess is highlighting throughout the conversation is not that customer experience is a leading revenue driver, but instead that it is a forgotten one. There are countless examples of brands failing to make a commoditized market exciting. However, in Feastables’ instance, they’ve betted on a first-class customer experience to get the job done.
We’re excited about what’s next for Feastables. You can find their products online at Feastables.com or in Walmarts across the country.