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Brand marketers are adopting fan-first social media strategies
For soft-drink brand Poppi, fans come before consumers. The Pepsico-owned brand has bottled up an innovative approach to social media that’s beginning to be picked up by the marketers behind the industry’s largest brands, but it carries risks, too.
“We’re community first. I like to say it’s pop culture,” said Sophia Sesto, who leads the team behind the beverage brand’s social media, creator and ambassador operations. Rather than attempting to appeal to the broadest range of users possible, the brand’s social media operation is tuned to reach Poppi diehards on TikTok and Instagram. It’s a strategy that led the company to gain a 34% share of the “functional soda” consumer category prior to its $1.95 billion acquisition by Pepsico.
According to Sesto, the brand’s “fans” act as evangelists for its fizzy qualities online, amplifying its content while also providing a source for social listening and trend observation, and a quick-acting focus group rooting its product development in real consumer connection.
It’s a methodology that requires a keen understanding of consumers’ lives, and their media habits. Marketers pursuing it must adopt “a creator-esque mindset,” said Piet Southey, U.S. managing director at Billion Dollar Boy.
Poppi’s social media team pays close attention to TikTok, and followers’ comments, as a barometer of marketing success. Sesto said that on several occasions, comments have prompted limited time offer (LTO) product launches, such as a special Love Island flavor launched last summer.
“They know we’re listening to them and trying to deliver what they want in real time. There is a sense of ownership,” she said.
Counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s a recipe first developed when the business was still a startup. “They [the fans] have been on this journey with us from the beginning,” said Sesto, who was hired four years before Poppi’s Pepsico buyout.
Providing followers with not just a peek behind the curtain, but a passenger seat on a founder’s own journey, has become a proven strategy for charismatic business leaders — from Poppi’s own Allison Ellsworth to Marty Bell, Lach Hall, and Dakota Green, the co-founders of insurgent sunscreen brand Vacation.
And responding to viral, off-the-cuff social media jokes with a product release or marketing campaign isn’t, in and of itself, new. Couture house Loewe, for example, put out an heirloom tomato-themed clutch bag back in 2024, in response to a fan’s tweet.
But that recipe is increasingly being co-opted by major advertisers, whose marketers (whether they have ‘marketing’ in the job title or not) increasingly use their own social profiles, not just their brand’s, as a conduit for engaging fans.
McDonald’s senior marketing director Guillaume Huin, for example, uses his X profile to elicit customer feedback and spread news of limited-time products and campaigns — the prolific poster counts over 40,000 followers — to fans of the brand.
When the chain wants to trial a Happy Meal collaboration or tease a new marketing campaign, it can now do so through Huin’s profile, affording those moments the status of an insider leak shared with fans in the know, rather than a dry press release issued to the trades. It did just that last week, with a Hello Kitty and Godzilla crossover Happy Meal that’s officially set to launch next week.
Huin employs a similar level of attentiveness towards fans of the fast-food giant as Poppi does towards its soda fans, but with a twist: he uses his own voice, and owns the account.
Two weeks ago, McDonald’s promoted him to lead its global brand strategy, capping a remarkable rise for the executive who, just six years back, was an intern at McDonald’s French business.
Farther back, Zaria Parvez, the social media mastermind behind Duolingo’s digital owl mascot, was poached this time last year by DoorDash, to step in as its head of social media.
This focus on fandom comes as the participatory social internet becomes something closer to an entertainment channel, with fewer regular users posting at all, and feeds becoming dominated by paid content or creator posts.
Just under half (49%) of British social media users say they actively post on Instagram and Facebook, down from 61% in 2025, according to Ofcom, while another survey estimated that 55% of Americans say they post less than they did five years ago.
A fan-forward social media approach gives brands a better shot at engaging with those increasingly withdrawn web users, noted BDB’s Southey, especially those pushing into semi-closed social spaces like WhatsApp channels or Discord groups. The aim, he argued, isn’t just to provoke engagement but to grow brand equity through world-building. “You create a world of the brand that fans can play in,” he explained. “There’s intrigue for new consumers: ‘What is this?’ People want to get involved.”
And there is a push at some brands to turn employees into influencers. Kathryn Turner, director of product development at British supermarket retailer Marks & Spencer, for example, has gained 93,100 Instagram followers by posting what essentially amounts to behind-the-scenes creator content.
The difference here is that brand marketers are also responsible for the rest of their briefs. And that requires a different skillset from CMOs. While top brand execs would previously have brought decades of operational expertise managing agency relationships, shepherding campaigns to fruition or divining insights from sales data — Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard worked as a financial analyst for seven years before he got his hands on one of the CPG giant’s brands — they’re now also expected to have a creator’s instinct with TikTok and Instagram.
Half of the staffers on Poppi’s culture team were hired by Sesto straight out of university. “I trust them… they understand our consumer, that Gen Zennial female to a T,” she said.
“They are able to engage with social media the way other people might use Microsoft 365,” said advertising headhunter Sasha Martens. “It shows a level of commitment to the industry and a level of flexibility.”
That’s pushing marketers like Huin and Parvez into positions of power. It also requires that the brands employing execs like them become comfortable with certain risks.
For one, staffers using their own channels to push out content will be able to take that audience with them through the remainder of their careers. “There is definitely a huge added layer,” said Southey. “I think, possibly, the pros outweigh the cons, though.”
Another is the need to relinquish strict brand voice guidelines or approval systems, in order that marketers gain the ability to respond quickly enough, or in a way that reinforces their humanity, rather than their official status.
“This would scare so many brands,” said Sesto.
The marketers with the stomach for that style of persuasion may soon be running the industry.
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