“Social Nature was an important part of launching our brand, CHKN Not Chicken. First, they allowed us to target shoppers of our anchor retailer, Sprouts, which focused our investment where we needed it most. Second, they ensured we sampled our product with shoppers that were excited about plant-based options. We also received a ton of data about our category, about our brand, product attributes, and consumer behavior. The program would have been worth the investment for the data alone. The team at Social Nature was professional, proactive, and guided us every step of the way. This was our first Social Nature program but it will not be our last.”
Brian Pope
Co-Founder and CEO, CHKN not Chicken
Social Nature continues to help us support our product launches with real, valuable consumer feedback. For example, we just launched a new format of Seaweed Snack packaging (finally, no plastic tray!), and the Social Nature community spoke and confirmed that our Trayless Seaweed Snacks offer the same amount of seaweed and equal seaweed-snacking experience with less “annoying extra plastic”* waste. We’ve affirmed that seaweed-snackers don’t like having the plastic tray inside and that it is not necessary. This is a win-win for consumers (less waste) and retailers (more efficiency in transit and on shelf).
We love Social Nature for building direct customer interactions that provide reviews & feedback for R&D and affirmation of concepts and drive trial for new and existing products.
Matt Ryan
Chief Marketing Officer & Co-Officer of Sustainability
“Launching a new brand in the midst of COVID has proven to be tough; we knew that we needed to get the product out into the hands of our core consumers in a big yet strategic way, and Social Nature was exactly the platform that we needed! The Social Nature members have proven to be right on target with our demographic – health conscious, educated, insightful. We utilized their pre trial insights to help narrow our brand story, and will continue to use their post trial insights to build the strategic future in terms of innovation, target retailers and attributes to really highlight. The entire program from the start to the very end has been buttoned up, organized, and well communicated, and we are so excited to have these members continue to trial and enjoy our product!”
Jayme Brown
Marketing Director, Bon Devil
“As an emerging brand in the instant quinoa category, Social Nature’s direct-to-consumer campaign helped me gain valuable consumer insights and actionable feedback. Keen One Quinoa puts a lot of emphasis on customer satisfaction, and understanding more about what our customers liked and didn’t like will clarify our future marketing and community-building efforts.
The biggest highlight was the ease of use and organization of the platform to simplify the process. SN had a great template and custom question laid out prior to the onboarding call that was easy to edit and streamline to get the best results from customer surveys. This allowed for us to gain insights on what customers thought about our products prior to sampling and post sampling.
SN allowed us to pinpoint the attributes customers enjoy most about our products. It also showed us which retailers they would be interested in purchasing which is also very helpful.”
Christopher Algea
Founder + President, Keen One Quinoa
“Being able to see the sampling campaign data and filter it in real-time is awesome. It’s really easy to read and we’re definitely using the data to pitch to retailers.
What we’re capturing here is user feedback and store-level data to keep a pulse on our brand. Unlike other data which can be hard to dig through, this data populates in real-time and is easy to understand what’s happening with our brand across retailers.”
Chris Senter
Marketing Manager, Bakery On Main
“When I decided to work with Social Nature, I hoped to drive trial and continue increasing velocities at an important account for us. What I didn’t realize was that I would also gain important insights about our customer base and how they think about our product and our category. Our learnings have ended up impacting everything from our packaging design to our pitch deck. As the cherry on top, the Social Nature team members are true professionals: super smart, responsive, and kind. I would recommend Social Nature to any CPG brand.”
Emily Groden
Founder & CEO, Evergreen
“The insights from Social Nature give us great confidence strategically to move forward as we think about our portfolio priorities. Overall, we had a good experience with the campaign and the solid metrics received.“
Heather Scott
Senior VP, Marketing, Wild Planet Foods
“The results from our first campaign have been so helpful in learning detailed product feedback, challenges consumers are facing in retailers and what types of consumers are most interested in our product and brand. I look forward to using the results to better understand our ideal customer, promote brand authority through testimonials and nurture the new customers who enjoyed our product!”
Rachel Dolecheck
Marketing Manager, Crafty Counter
“The unique value of Social Nature is how it crosses marketing boundaries. Aside from helping us support our key retailers, the cross-platform deliverables also provided us market research, product reviews, and social content. It’s not easy to collect this type of rich, retail-specific consumer feedback when a product is bought off a store shelf. Social Nature’s customer success team has been amazing at helping us build and optimize the program and are super-responsive throughout the process.”
Francine Sternthal
Vice President, Marketing, Fody Foods
“Social Nature has become a really important platform in the natural products world helping many brands launch & scale.
I love the combination of in-store trial and online reviews. The in-store trial helps me support my retailers, increases awareness for new products, and supports repeat purchases.
Social Nature’s insights capabilities also help me quickly validate product-market fit and identify practical ways to optimize my products, drive more innovation and brand growth. I launch about 10 new products per year – with Social Nature I have a 90% success rate (compared to 70% failure rate as is common to most CPG). If you’re a high growth brand with lots of innovation decisions and new distribution ahead of you – Social Nature is who you want to partner with.”
Robert Mock
Founder and CEO, Ocean’s Halo
“It’s always been a pleasure working with the Social Nature team over the last three years. We love that true and complete shopper journeys are created with our campaigns, from finding the product in store, moving it off shelf, trial, and reviewing. The insights we receive are so valuable to sales, marketing, and innovation. The Social Nature team is client-centered and flexible, a true joy to work with.“
Lindsey Duncan
Consumer Marketing Manager, Bob's Red Mill
Plant-Based
“We love using Social Nature for concept testing our innovations; their community is highly engaged which translates into valuable consumer insights. We use several providers for insights & innovation, but have been most impressed by the quality of responses, level of service, and quick results that Social Nature’s digital focus group provides.”
Gio Scalzo
Sr. Director Strategic Initiatives, Bolthouse Farms
“Loma Linda is a 100-year-old, plant-based protein brand. They are using Social Nature as an alternative to in-store demos and love that they hyper-target their ideal consumer and collect product reviews with our digital-first solution while increasing velocity at their keybrick & mortar accounts. “This is the most effective marketing campaign we’ve ever run.”
Tara Rhein
Marketing Manager, Loma Linda
“The customer success team at Social Nature is second to none. They make setup, management, and analysis of our campaign easy to execute and understand. Our campaign served its purpose of increasing awareness of our brand among natural-focused consumers in the targeted locations where we’re available at retail. The survey responses we received were also very valuable in helping us to better refine our brand messaging and assortment.”
Caitlin Pellas
Director of Marketing, Nourish Organics
“I appreciate how you turn free sampling into a data collection opportunity, I will be presenting these product insights to my R&D team, marketing team for positioning, and sales team for buyer conversations. We look forward to featuring different products every month to sample to our ideal target consumer and get more data.”
Austin Allan
Senior Brand Manager, Dr. Praeger’s
Snacks
“Working with the Social Nature was a dream! We were not only able to have extremely actionable results, but their team developed the results in such a visual way that we were able to make changes immediately. Listening to your brand’s grocery customers first-hand is usually incredibly difficult, but Social Nature has created a way to let a brand ask the much needed questions before and after purchase. We highly recommend using Social Nature to not only increase in-store purchases, but also to gain insightful feedback from your in-store customers.”
“Our goal with Social Nature was to increase brand awareness and introduce our products to a new consumer base and drive trial. Not only did this platform introduce our brand and products to new customers, the reviews and quality of data provided back to our team is invaluable. We gained quality customer reviews that we were able to push through to our retail websites, incredible insights from our campaign, plus sampling to customers with high re-purchase intent. We look forward to working with Social Nature again!”
Caitlyn McAniff
Senior Marketing Manager, Fresh Cravings
“We found the insights from Social Nature’s drive-to-store campaigns to be insightful and provocative. The data deepens our knowledge concerning our ideal consumers, and validates the importance and commitment to quality behind the Comvita brand. On the retail side, we now have rich data for our buyer meetings – brand awareness, future purchase intent, and the stores where their consumers shop.“
Erin Kelley
Director of Product, Comvita USA
“Our Social Nature campaign gave us insights into what the consumer actually thinks of our product and which attributes matter the most. The product ratings were the highest we’ve ever seen and this reinforced that targeting the right consumer with the right messaging creates high purchase intent.”
Christina Appleton
Marketing & E-Commerce, Karma Nuts
Sauces & Spreads
“Having access to the large Social Nature community was a great way to reach a new audience, expand our presence with a retail partner, and receive customer feedback. The sampling program helped us capture the buyers attention and better understand how the consumer connected with the product. The pre and post questionnaire was a great tool to gain shopping insights and helped with our current expansion.”
Aprille Brooker
Marketing Director, Dress It Up Dressings
“Social Nature is a win-win-win — a win for brands, a win for consumers, and a win for retailers. If you’re a high-growth brand focused on growing your velocity and sell-thru at retailers you need Social Nature. I’ve stopped doing traditional demos and am shifting my budget to Social Nature’s Digital Demos for better targeting and results.“
Alison Cayne
Founder, Haven’s Kitchen
“I just wanted to double down on this review to say we get a lot of solicitations for places to spend our marketing dollars. We are careful about the places where we spend that precious cash and more often than I enjoy admitting, we regret the decision. Without a doubt, the best money we have spent on marketing to date has been with Social Nature. Thank you for giving us a real means by which to reach customers, learn about them, and satisfy our retailer partners. We look forward to partnering with you in the future.”
Sophia Maroon
Founder and CEO of Dress It Up Dressings
“The unique value of Social Nature is how it crosses marketing boundaries. Aside from helping us support our key retailers, the cross-platform deliverables also provided us market research, product reviews, and social content. It’s not easy to collect this type of rich, retail-specific consumer feedback when a product is bought off a store shelf. Social Nature’s customer success team has been amazing at helping us build and optimize the program and are super-responsive throughout the process.”
Francine Sternthal
Vice President, Marketing, Fody Foods
“We were so impressed with the results from our first campaign with Social Nature. After recently launching in Sprouts Farmers Market, we experienced a noticeable sales lift across the entire Fix & Fogg range. We will definitely be using Social Nature again in our expansion into other supermarkets across the USA. The supermarket-specific insights and consumer feedback have helped us gain better insights into who our ideal shopper is.“
Sarah Sherriff
Head of Export, Fix & Fogg
Frozen Foods
“Social Nature is the best investment our business has ever made, period. The data and customer service we’ve received throughout the process is absolutely priceless and cannot be obtained anywhere else. We look forward to working with Social Nature for years to come.”
Tate Glasgow
VP of Marketing, Killer Creamery
“Even if physical demos are available, the level of sophistication that Social Nature provides in terms of targeting and communication with customers is virtually impossible for a small brand like ours outside this platform.
Some of our best endorsements on our website are from the Social Nature product reviews, which has been extremely helpful in giving new customers a picture of what the product tastes like and how it could fit into their everyday life.
We have not found a program with a better ROI for learning directly from our customers. We have gained a much deeper understanding of who our customer is, what they care about, and how to best communicate our value proposition.”
Jake Kneller
Co-Founder, Sweet Nothings
“Product demos have been a pain point for emerging brands for a long time. They are a necessary evil that is expensive, inefficient and unmeasurable. Social Nature solves many of these pain points by creating a demoing process that is much more targeted to potentially super loyal consumers of your brand. You also gain valuable insights from surveys and reviews. The old playbook was having people demo in-store. The new playbook is Digital Demos.“
Tyler Mayoras
Co-Founder & CEO, Cool Beans
“Social Nature has helped Alpha Foods increase unit velocity by 20% post campaign by driving trial with consumers new to the brand. What we value most about our relationship with Social Nature, in addition to the results we’ve generated, is the invaluable joint-business planning and strategic partnership we have with their team.”
Arinn Ryan
Director of Marketing, Alpha Foods
Beverages
“One thing that Digital Demos does well and captures the buyer’s attention is this: telling them that you’ll send 1000 of their customers to their store to buy your product. This is incremental dollars in the retailer’s pocket. Buyers feel confident knowing that you have a proactive plan to drive trial and the products won’t just sit on the shelf.”
Paul Vogue
Co-Founder, Aura Bora
“It’s been a pleasure working with the Social Nature team. Their attention to detail and speed of answering all our questions and executing on our additional data requests is definitely noted. The reporting and analysis of the data shows us how deep the insights can get and how beneficial it is across all our internal teams. We are excited to share these insights back with our team”
Halina Lukoskie
Brand Partnerships & Marketing Manager, Sunwink
“We think Social Nature has done an amazing job of helping us reach new consumers and get them to try Tiesta Tea. We are seeing a lot of value for our brand and we want to continue working together because the Social Nature community fits our community.”
Alex Sosnov
COO, Tiesta Tea
“Our goal in working with Social Nature was to execute a targeted sampling program while increasing velocity at one of our largest retailers — and they absolutely delivered. Not only were we able to find and target our ideal consumers, but we were also able to glean some incredible insights into their shopping behaviour and how Viveau fit into their shopping basket. On top of that, the final report provided our sales team with key metrics to take back to our retail partner. Social Nature really acted as an extension of our team and we can’t wait to work with them again in the future.“
Taylor Stokal
Senior Manager, Digital and Growth Marketing, Viveau
“I manage OLIPOP’s Trade Marketing initiatives and am always looking to build and engage with creative initiatives. I appreciate the layers of value built into Social Nature: driving trial in stores, producing retailer-specific consumer insights data, supporting brand awareness, and generating authentic product reviews to syndicate to e-commerce channels. Plus the Social Nature team is great to work with!“
Leah Dockstader
Trade Marketing, OLIPOP
Beauty
“We love that we can geo-target consumers and drive them into our key accounts like Whole Foods and Sprouts to try our new products. We also love seeing the real time feedback about our products online. Social Nature is an amazing integrated marketing solution.”
Martin Floreani
CEO, MyChelle Dermaceuticals
“For an emerging brand, I found the consumer insights and reviews to be valuable in providing data to back up our marketing decisions. Hearing direct feedback from our ideal audience will help pH Balance Skincare move consumers from conventional brands to better-for-you brands like ours, which focus on natural ingredients and truly ph balanced skincare.”
Aniko Peterson
Managing Member, pH Balance
“Partnering with Social Nature has helped us to increase our brand awareness in Canada. The best thing about Social Nature is that we have been able to get our products into thousands of our target consumers’ hands for the first time. We are consistently impressed with the quality of reviews, insights, and product feedback that the community shares.“
Melinda Salvoza
Director, New Product Development & Product Marketing, DERMA E
Vitamins & Supplements
Social Nature has been a really valuable tool for Natural Calm to get new people trying our products and turn them into customers. We know that for our products, trial is so important because consumers need to feel the benefits in order to believe it. In our last campaign, we loved seeing that 83% of people who tried our product were interested in buying it, and 81% felt calmer afterwards. We plan to continue working with Social Nature to support the launches of our new products in 2022.
Chad Shears
Marketing Director, Natural Calm
“Social Nature has been a very pleasant and insightful group to work with. The ability to connect with qualified leads and get honest and supportive feedback has been quite useful for our meetings with investors and retailers.”
David Sheu
Co-Founder and CEO, Bears Nutrition
“We’ve had a great experience with Social Nature supporting our new product launch at Whole Foods Market. This is real data that we can take back to our team to continue to improve on Neuro’s products. I’m very happy with the results and insights – the follow through and experience has been valuable for an emerging brand and new functional category like our mints.“
Ryan Chen
Co-Founder, Neuro
“It’s a great platform for getting your product in front of the people who use them. And with the insights collected and analyzed from your campaign, you might learn a new thing or two too.”
Norman Goh
VP Marketing, Orange Naturals
“Sampling is an important part of attracting new consumers and it was made very difficult during the pandemic. The team at Social Nature helped us overcome this issue and were super easy to work with. We were able to customize all aspects of the campaign to ensure our brand was well presented. The insights we gained from the survey and the customer reviews were invaluable. I look forward to working with Social Nature again!“
Jeff Ing
Brand Manager, Jamieson Wellness
“Reviews, to me, are the new currency. I have been thrilled with the measured new customer acquisition, where consumers raise their hand, show interest, and ultimately come back to Social Nature to write their review. When it comes to marketing solutions, it requires ingenuity, if it is already being done, you are too late! Social Nature’s community aligns so well with our target audience allowing us to provide brand education and trial which are critical to illustrating our products’ unique differentiators in the vitamin space.“
Tonya Skurzynski
Chief Revenue Officer, Frunutta
“We had a wonderful experience working with Social Nature to help launch a new supplement product, leveraging their unique programs to assist with initial product design as well as drive a successful launch in market. We tested product benefits with their audience upfront to understand preferences and optimal product features, and then used their sampling program at launch to get feedback and product reviews on the final product, while spreading awareness among a passionate group of consumers. The combination of these activities allowed us to develop and launch a successful product! Social Nature’s consumer base is a great fit for our plant-based brand – we loved the added benefit of their shared social posts and warm recommendations.“
Farrell Rodd
Brand Manager, CocoaVia
“Social Nature is a true business partner. They cared about our customers and our campaign as if it was their own and really went the extra mile to help ensure its success. From account management to customer service we felt supported the entire time. As a first time brand partnering with Social Nature we have seen a full recovery of the cost of our investment, received over 150 customer reviews of our new product, and as a subscription business, over 25% of customers purchased at least a second time. We are quite please with these results and highly recommend Social Nature as a potential trial partner.“
Phil Desrochers
Co-Founder, SHINE Health
“Directly due to the reviews we’ve received from the Social Nature campaigns, many of our products now have the most reviews in their categories – beating out our competitors at major retailers like Target.
We’ve been able to use this data in key meetings to show how we know our products will be successful, both in-store and online.
What I appreciate about Social Nature’s over 70% response rate is that we’re getting a better sense of honest feedback from the larger set of in-between consumers who don’t normally leave reviews elsewhere.”
Emily Hazlett
Director of Brand Marketing, Genexa
Household
“Social Nature is an efficient, well-run product sampling and consumer insights program for our CPG clients. Our client has reported an astounding 80% redemption rate on the free trial coupons that Social Nature distributed to their members – this demonstrates that Social Nature has the right consumer for our brands. We will absolutely be recommending our client renew their annual subscription, as a best in class sampling program for impact at retail.”
“The consumer insights we’ve gained through Social Nature’s product sampling programs have helped us in 3 key ways: 1) we’ve adjusted our digital ad targeting and creative based on who expressed interest in our products and why they wanted to try them, 2) we updated the design of our product packaging to highlight top ranked product attributes, 3) it helped us understand more about the profile of each our shoppers at each of our key retailers. With such a huge quantity of members across our focus retailers and markets, we couldn’t pay for better research anywhere else.”
Catherine Porter
Chief Marketing Officer, Elohi Strategic Advisors
“We’ve decided to spend a large percentage of our marketing budget on future campaigns with Social Nature as they can bridge digital with brick and mortar. We’d be crazy not to tap into this ‘social review’ power.
We can talk to retailers all day about what the ‘natural’ consumers tell us about our products, but Social Nature gives us that proof and validation, with visualized data to back it up. The proactive pre-trial data and reactive post-trial data social nature provides gives crucial insight into a consumer’s journey with the EarthKind brand during this process. This is what our buyers want to see to make their category decision. We also love the consistent stream of new reviews from engaged shoppers available at our fingertips.”
Kari Warberg Block
CEO, EarthKind
“I had a fantastic experience working with Social Nature on our Astroglide sampling campaign. I loved the ease of execution in getting the samples into the hands of new consumers, and seeing all of the awesome results and insights come from the reviews.“
Maribel Hernandez
Associate Marketing Manager, BioFilm Inc. (Astroglide)
“Social Nature has built a digital-first platform, backed by some amazing CPG investors, that helps brands drive very targeted user acquisition/trial, generate online reviews, and seed tons of social engagement.
In many ways it’s a more cost-effective & retail-first version of what Amazon does with their Vine program to build a groundswell of traction to help launch products.
Annalea & Social Nature have become a really important platform in the natural products world helping many brands launch & scale. We’ve been impressed by how engaged their community is, their level of service, and the quick results they drive for growing brands like ours.“
