Credit: @officialnutterbutter / TikTok
At first glance, Nutter Butter’s TikTok presence is, in a word, confusing. Its highest-viewed video, at 12.3 million views, features eerie music and a slideshow of a Nutter Butter family. The family is in a dollhouse smeared with peanut butter resembling crime scene blood. Other videos use green screen, fast-paced editing, and other video effects to raise more questions than answers.
With a bio that only reads “YES” with a link to Nutter Butter’s equally absurd Instagram account, it can be challenging to understand how they’ve amassed 1.5 million followers and 10.2 million likes on the video platform. The omnipresent Nutter Butter cookie and occasional use of the logo are the only indications that any of these TikToks are affiliated with the brand. One of their videos from November was even flagged for “sensitive content.” (The sensitive content is a creepy mask jumpscare.)
Brands have been leveraging social media in more casual and unorthodox ways since Wendy’s clapped back against users on Twitter in 2017, but Nutter Butter takes it to a whole new level to reach the new generations of consumers. Zach Poczekaj, a senior social media manager at Dentsu Creative, works with Caitlin Bolmarcich, Nutter Butter’s brand manager, and Kelly Amatangelo, the digital and social lead for Mondelez (Nutter Butter’s parent company), to run the accounts.
Poczekaj described their social presence as “a rabbit hole,” where users “fall” to see surreal content, emphasizing the value of an ambiguous storyline that users try to piece together by scrolling through the accounts as a whole. Rather than just viewing a singular post on their timeline, the Nutter Butter social team says many users will look back at past content to try and understand what’s going on. It’s a mystery with no real answers beyond the audience's interpretation.
As a long-established brand, Nutter Butter had to carve out new audiences on social media and insert themselves back into the conversation. Their unique approach to socials fostered organic conversations by adapting to a new communication medium without feeling too corporate.
While Nutter Butter starts the conversation, the audience maintains it. And it doesn’t take too much scrolling to find a comment that says, “I haven’t thought about Nutter Butter in years but I just bought some.”
A meaningless, surreal TikTok driving purchases? Now, that’s the power of memes.
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