Creating brand ownership among weary, skeptical, #adulting millennials is no easy feat. And while we’ve all heard it all before, it bears repeating: authenticity is king, transparency is a must, and unfiltered content reigns supreme. We couldn’t just hijack pop culture – we needed to infiltrate it.

So we made a critical (and kinda crazy) decision: We decided to stop talking about Emerald Nuts. Instead, we let our customers do it for us.

The idea can be summed up in five simple words: Don’t take our word for it.

For inspiration, we turned our attention to Amazon customer reviews. And as we sifted through the thousands of glowing reviews for Emerald, we stumbled upon a review that stopped us in our tracks: “Yes Good.”

That’s it. Two perfect words. We loved it so much, we decided to make “Yes Good” the new Emerald Nuts tagline.

First, we announced that Emerald was done talking about itself. Instead, we were going to let our fans do all the talking. We even updated the product descriptions on Emerald’s website with real customer reviews.

Next, we launched our “Revue of Reviews” – animated films and GIFs of our favorite customer reviews. And finally, we unveiled our new tagline with social, digital, out-of-home, and real world swag – plastering “Yes Good” everywhere. We even created a website dedicated to finding the anonymous reviewer, known only to us as “Amazon Customer.”

The Emerald campaign was a hit among millennial snackers – inspiring even more glowing customer reviews. And despite a very modest media budget, Yes Good got noticed – garnering headlines in Forbes, AdWeek, and AdAge. Creativity Online featured the campaign as an Editor’s Pick, AdWeek called it “tagline of the year,” and Deutsch New York’s chief creative officer, Dan Kelleher, sang the praises of Yes Good on The Drum.

In Kelleher’s words:

“If ‘Tastes Great, Less Filling’ had a ménage à trois with ‘Drivers Wanted’ and ‘Think Different,’ their beautiful love child would be Emerald Nuts’ new tagline, 'Yes Good.'

It’s the ‘Just Do It’ of almonds.

The ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’ of cashews.

The ‘We Try Harder’ of trail mix.”

But the best measure of success? Emerald Nuts is now the category leader among millennials, with the highest brand index than any other snack nut brand. Yes Good, indeed.

As the snack nut underdog within a highly commoditized category, we were faced with a challenge: create brand ownership among millennial snackers. To succeed, we needed to keep our millennial customer at the center of everything we did, both strategically and creatively.

Yes Good wasn’t just customer-inspired – it was customer-centric. We turned the Emerald brand over to our fans. We stopped talking about ourselves – and let our fans do the talking for us.

And it paid off. We converted awareness to preference, loyalty to ownership – inspiring even more glowing reviews about the deliciousness that is Emerald Nuts.

One segmentation study coined our target audience as “Yummy Munchers.” We prefer, simply: millennial snackers. Meanwhile, AdAge labeled millennials as the “Generic Generation” – infamously fickle and brand disloyal.

This challenge is even more apparent in the highly commoditized snack nut category, with countless generic snack nuts are duking it out in a price war to the bottom – nameless, faceless, and completely interchangeable. The problem: People think a nut is a nut is a nut.

We needed to show millennial snackers that Emerald Nuts are seriously tasty nuts from a not-so-serious company. We needed to prove that not all nuts are created equal.

But as a relatively unknown brand with a media budget the size of a pistachio, it wasn’t just about what we said. It was how and where we said it. We couldn’t just talk the talk. We had to walk the walk.

Emerald Nuts was a small brand with big ambitions. They told us they wanted millennials to “try and then love Emerald… tattooing Emerald on their biceps… shaping their millennial beards into the Emerald logo.” And yes, they were serious.

The only problem? In a category dominated by heavy-hitters like Planters and Wonderful Pistachios, we needed to punch above our media weight and prove that Emerald has the absolute tastiest, best nuts around.

But as the category underdog, it wasn’t enough to just drive brand awareness. In order to truly resonate and succeed with our millennial target, we needed to create brand ownership. Millennials had to become a part of the Emerald Nuts’ brand – integral to its success.