Before paid media began, Wendy’s needed to create buzz about its new Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburger. Wendy’s pretzel buns are customer favorites, but they’ve been off the market for years. Our objective was to generate attention organically for the Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburger. We decided to seed a hint about pretzels to drum up excitement for the pretzel bun’s return on the new Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburger.

Conspiracy theorists claim that the character’s collar in the Wendy’s company logo spells “MOM.” While untrue, we decided to add fuel to the fire. Ahead of the Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburger launch, we quietly updated our logo in the Wendy’s Twitter account profile picture with a twisted pretzel where the supposed “MOM” was prior.

We decided to alert our most passionate fans first: our famous Twitter account followers. Wendy’s uses Twitter as its digital communication hub, so it was a natural starting place for this organic effort. Our following is highly engaged with the Wendy’s brand and our account, so we decided to activate their intense interest to our benefit. If they’re tuned in enough to make YouTube videos discussing our pseudo-MOM collar and ask us about it on Twitter, we suspected they would notice even the smallest of changes to our profile picture.

Ahead of the Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburger launch, we redesigned and updated our logo in the Wendy’s Twitter account profile picture by replacing the circle of the supposed “MOM” collar with a simply designed twisted pretzel icon. We made the pretzel small and subtle — just subtle enough for our fans to notice and start speculating about our pretzel bun’s return. Then we made it our Twitter profile picture.

Our audience noticed quickly and fueled new speculation and excitement about what was to come. It rapidly accumulated 2 million organic impressions and set off conversation about the logo change and the potential return of our pretzel bun. That small change set the stage for our launch. Demand for the new Pretzel Bacon Pub Cheeseburger was red-hot from the start, resulting in sales that exceeded forecasts by 45% and contributed to Wendy’s rise to the No. 2 hamburger fast food chain in 2020.