Hippo Baked Munchies was launched by Parle Agro Pvt. Ltd., in the competitive Indian Snacks Market in January 2009, and was followed by a communication launch in January 2010. Hippo’s vibrant, unconventional packaging and universal philosophy of ‘Fight Hunger, Fight Evil’ made it a runaway success.

Hippo’s growth hit a roadblock when consumers’ demand for it far exceeded the supply of the brand as consumers were being greeted by empty shelves in 400,000 retail stores, across India. This overwhelmed the nascent sales and distribution team as they found it challenging to track and replenish stocks quickly. To restock Hippo packs the conventional way would have taken a week’s time since the Indian Snack market is comprised of 92% unorganized retail. So we had to come up with a strategy to replenish stock at empty stores before consumers wrongly believed that the brand had failed. We needed an alternative inventory tracking system that was quick and cost-effective.We found the answer in the platform of Twitter and invented ‘Plan-T’. Through Hippo’s popular twitter account, we made him interact with his followers, urging them to tweet to him in case they found empty racks in stores. A core cell was set up to monitor, analyse and pass on information collected from the tweets to local distributors in respective areas, who then replenished the stocks in 24 hours.In a country dominated by traditional media, would connecting with Hippo’s die-hard supporters through twitter make the necessary impact? Of course it did! Hippo’s young target consumers are digitally savvy and were motivated by the fact that a snack brand was actually acting, based on their tweets. Not only did we connect with consumers, we enabled them to lead the inventory tracking campaign.Plan-T drove consumers to report empty shelves on-the-go, across 400,000 stores, in about 53 cities and towns across 18 Indian states. All this – within a span of 6 months.

Plan-T, along with the existing sales and distribution team helped Hippo post a 76% increase in sales within 6 months. Never before in the history of marketing and communication had a brand managed to get its consumers to partner with it in solving a problem as technical as inventory and distribution. That too at a fraction of the cost of a mainstream marketing campaign.