Chances are you’ve never heard of Cheerwine, but if you do know the name you may well be stockpiling glass bottles of it by the case. The principal online distributor of this 94-year-old North Carolina specialty has a mystery on its hands: why, pray tell, is there a Cheerwine boom? “Sales have tripled since December,” said David Rivers, the president of Keg Works, a Buffalo-based Internet retailer of old-timey sodas and drink-related products.
Mr. Rivers has several theories about the Cheerwine sales spike, and his top suspects are Facebook and Twitter. “You have to understand that Cheerwine has a huge cult following,” he said, “and the people who love it are fanatics. One of them described it to me as ‘adult crack.’ ”
Recently KegWorks has been promoting Cheerwine heavily in social media “and on Twitter and on our own blog, and suddenly the fanatics are talking to each other, giving people who have moved away from the South the sudden realization that there is the possibility of ordering it,” he said.
For many, Mr. Barbitta said, “it connects people back to their roots, if they went to North Carolina State or Duke or Chapel Hill,” so their connection, he added, “is emotional,” thus the power of the social-network association. Cheerwine has more than 63,000 fans on Facebook.
Interesting post. Do you know if they actively created a hype about the brand or if it started by user-generated content on Facebook? Did sales rise after they used social media?
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