Innocent's McEwan tells IPG: 'personal contact with consumers is powerful'

Businesses should not underestimate the power of personal one-to-one connections with consumers, Joe McEwan, head of digital and communities at drinks company Innocent, has advised delegates to the IPG Spring Conference.

Giving the first keynote speech of the conference, McEwan discussed the “inherently” social nature of Innocent, which allowed it to engage with consumers even before social media using its packaging.

"We’re unique in terms of sheer contact we get [with consumers], and especially the quality of that contact. We have a properly thriving two-way relationship with our drinkers. We were social before social media; Innocent has always been a very social brand. Before Facebook and Twitter we were working very hard to meet and talk to people; we were inherently social."

The company continued to cultivate relationships with consumers via events. In 2003, Innocent put on a free music festival called Fruitstock which saw 30,000 people attend. In 2006, more people went to the festival than bought a ticket to that year's Glastonbury music festival, McEwan said.

Giving examples of successful campaigns, McEwan discussed a campaign the company used to get customers to buy a new drink involving sending out 11,000 personalised handwritten notes in the post. "In an age of high-tech and social media don't forget the charm of the personal touch lots of people forget how charming and powerful a handwritten note can be". He added: "I used to be obsessed with [Facebook] 'likes' and retweets, but now what I would put ahead of any retweet, any like, is if [our] content actually gets us talking to people. That’s what’s worthwhile. The real value for me is being able to talk to people one-on-one", he said.

The success of the Innocent brand relies on the company's committment to its "main thing", McEwan said, which is "helping people live well and die old". This means that the company is able to grow and support different initiatives, for example, charitable giving and fair sourcing of ingredients, while "keeping the main thing the main thing". He said businesses should "know what they're about". 

McEwan said that the company tries to keep a small business mentality as it grows, and continues to keep close to the people who buy its drinks. "Something I'm very proud of is that as we’ve grown, we’ve continued to elevate the importance of staying in touch with people and of continuing to find ways to show people that we care, to keep the gap between the guys in the ivory towers making decisions about the business to the guys on the street who actually buy our products as narrow as possible," he said.

Innocent is now owned by Coca-Cola.