Hippo Baked Munchies, a new entrant in the $1.5bn Indian snack market was launched in 400,000 stores across India. Unexpected sales put pressure on Hippo’s new yet efficient Sales & Distribution network. Stocks were drying up in stores by the hour and they found it challenging to track and re-stock the empty stores as quickly. Especially as 92% of the Indian snack market is still unorganised retail.The challenge was to track empty stores quickly and plug the lag in supply, and help Hippo cope with this super demand.

Hippo used Twitter to do something that it has never been expected to do before: To act as an inventory tracking interface. To get consumers to track stock by the hour and report to the Sales & Distribution teams. To do this, Hippo got his followers on Twitter to send him a tweet whenever they were unable to find Hippo packs at a store. A core cell was set up to collect and disburse this information to the respective sales teams who restocked the store within hours. Hippo sent personalised hampers and live updates on stock replenishment. He also lauded them for their effort on Twitter amongst their peer group.

Tweets poured in from 45 cities across India. At zero cost, Hippo had 400 additional people helping with Sales & Distribution over Twitter – equivalent to almost 50% of the strength of its Sales & Distribution network itself. Sales rose by 76% in the first few months of its launch. The campaign even helped Hippo identify, gauge demand, and prioritise its high potential new markets.