This holiday season, Twitter users noticed something was… off with their Reese’s Trees (a Seasonal product in stores over the Holidays every year). This year, they bore an unfortunate resemblance to, as never-shy consumers put it, “turds”. Blogs, news sites, and even TV shows quickly picked up the story, officially making Reese’s Trees a controversy. Over 5 days our clients worriedly watched the conversation grow - they had been hoping it would die away. Within two hours of a call to the agency we crafted a response. Our challenge was to rapidly utilize our loyal fan base to help spin the conversation away from how our product looked and towards how great it tasted. To leverage the cultural buzz to turn a quality control PR problem into a brand and sales-building opportunity.

At a time when social tolerance is at an all-time high, how could Reese’s Trees be treated so unfairly? Especially because it’s still a Reese’s. And still delicious. As fans put it – who cares what Trees look like when they taste this good.

Enter #AllTreesAreBeautiful. A way to spin the conversation by introducing a new injustice: tree shaming. This was a tongue-in-cheek way to turn the conversation back on the haters and give our fans an idea to rally around. We hijacked a popular social topic - that judging others and being focused on negative criticism is all about having the wrong priorities.

Because it’s such a beloved candy, fans jumped to the defense of the “turds.” Our fans were on our side.

So we took the conversation to the same place it started: Twitter. With 200K followers and the eyes of the media, this gave #AllTreesAreBeautiful the perfect platform to spread. We put the solution right in the hands of our biggest fans—and right next to the tweets that started the controversy to begin with.

#AllTreesAreBeautiful was comprised of a series of Twitter and facebook posts over the course of a month/December leaning into the themes of the Holiday season. Initially, it was a response to the controversy, but it evolved into a fun, often self-deprecating campaign that resonated with our consumers and, better yet, our detractors. We themed the mini-campaign around pertinent cultural topics such as “deflategate” (#treegate), Holiday sweaters and cards (#awkwardfamilyphotos.) All featuring our tree-ish looking product.

Consumers and celebrities alike loved the response. And the same media that cried, “Scandal!” championed the campaign’s positivity and wit, spreading the campaign’s reach well beyond social media.

Online, the campaign generated 260,000 social mentions, an 82% increase of brand mentions and 1 billion earned impressions.

Best of all, the sales of Reese’s Trees grew in 2015 by +7.4%, equating to $3M in sales growth in 2015, including $1M in sales during Christmas week. And it showed the world how you turn haters into followers, beautifully. Talk about polishing a turd.