Slim Jim was a faded 90s meat stick with declining product demand, struggling to connect with modern audiences.

In 2018 we made a radical change, dropping traditional advertising for organic social, focused on becoming the antidote for digital boredom the same way Slim Jim is to boring snacks. We built a cult following on Instagram and Twitter over four years by building community, not pushing product.

As our Millennial and Gen-Z audience migrated over to TikTok, we followed. TikTok audiences are notoriously skeptical of brands and marketing, with a clear preference for human-to-human interaction. We had to overcome the audience’s suspicion and reluctance to engage with a brand and build an engaged fan community on TikTok. This required a revolutionary grassroots approach.

Our objective was to reinvigorate Slim Jim and build connection with our new audience. We did so by adopting a strategy hyper native to TikTok and its users.

We introduced the CEO of Verified Comments, a fictional creator that runs the Slim Jim account. Always uplifting, always entertaining, and always there, we showed up wherever discourse and content was happening on TikTok and gave audiences the VERIFIED attention they craved, commenting to build community.

We treated our fans as peers instead of as consumers. We engaged with creators of all backgrounds and follower counts, reposting their content and encouraging them to keep creating. And we used our platform to boost the things our community told us they loved, commenting to help amplify emerging trends and content. This in turn shifted the audience's interest to creating for and with Slim Jim.

We identified an insight specific to TikTok: a comment from a verified account boosts your video inside the algorithm, exposing it to bigger audiences.

To help with understanding what was resonating with our target audience, we created multiple dummy accounts, modeled to reflect the interests and demographics of our different Millennial and Gen-Z audience personas. This gave us a direct view into what content and trends the TikTok algorithm was serving them, and helped us fine tune our messaging and connection with audiences.

We layered on the power of verified comments to supercharge our account’s reach and engagement rate. Our call to action asked our audience to ‘summon’ Slim Jim to comment on their content, resulting in higher visibility for their videos in the algorithm and increased engagement for our account overall, to mutual benefit. Audiences understood that engaging with Slim Jim extended our clout to them.

Using dummy accounts, we identified the trending sounds, videos, and themes of the moment. From there, we engaged with creators, commenters, and fans who were equally invested in these pockets of culture, commenting up to 500 times every day.

As one of the few brands that engaged at the peer-level, we became credible enough to join them in the cultural sandbox. In turn, creators paid us back with content celebrating Slim Jim, resulting in a self-renewing user generated content engine.

We created our account in February 2022, and grew to 4.2 million followers in only 6 months, without spending a single dollar on paid reach on TikTok.

Everything was shot on iPhone, relying solely on platform tools available to creators, to keep the content authentic to TikTok. We generated interest in the Slim Jim account by consistently championing users who engaged with us - whether by comments, questions, or UGC.

In just 6 months after launching Slim Jim’s TikTok account, we gained 4.2 million followers. Additionally, our strategy yielded over 8 million pieces of user generated content, resulting in 1.6 billion organic views of content on the platform with the #SlimJim tag and estimated 16 million comments. This is equivalent to $19 million in earned media.

Slim Jim had an average engagement rate of 15%, as compared to the 3.4% average engagement rate for brand accounts on TikTok.

We made 500 comments a day - as much as TikTok would allow us - every day over a 6 month period. This comes to approximately 90,000 comments on user videos. Our own videos average between 1500 - 2500 user comments each, for a total of over 300,000 comments.

Slim Jim’s current demand is up to a level where the product is regularly selling out at most retail locations across the country.