Christina Najjar, AKA Tinx, is known as a lot of things on TikTok: dating coach, the app’s “big sister,” creator of the “box theory.”

She’s also a fan of hot sauce, and it wasn’t long until Tabasco capitalized on that. Now, the two are collaborating on a salad dressing, marking the latest step in Tabasco’s evolving influencer marketing strategy and expansion beyond sauce.

Big picture: Tabasco has more than 90,000 followers on Instagram and 500,000 followers on TikTok. Lee Susen, chief sales and marketing officer at McIlhenny Company, told us working with influencers is a key element of the brand’s social strategy, which is focused on forming “direct connections with consumers.”

• “We’ve experimented with, over our history, many different ways of achieving the objective: Via print, via radio, via significant investment in television, to now really focusing on the most dynamic and agile way to interact with the consumer,” he said. “From a marketing investment standpoint, social media is the most significant way that we spend our dollars.”

We spoke with Susen about why Tabasco is prioritizing social and how it approaches influencer partnerships.

Dressing on the side

Last week, the brand released its new limited-edition dressing with Tinx. According to Susen, Tabasco has been interacting with Tinx since 2021, when the brand was made aware of her posts featuring Tabasco and the idea of “normalizing" hot sauce as a salad dressing. This, he said, was the impetus for the brand’s product expansion.

“Producing a dressing was not something that we had front of mind as a brand,” Susen said. “But to have an influencer come up with an idea and to really push us into a space, I think it [shows] the power of not only social media but the power of working with influencers who inspire you.”

• As part of its release, Tabasco worked with another of Tinx’s existing brand partners, Chipotle, to offer free entrée vouchers to the first 10,000 people who buy a bottle of dressing on Amazon.
• According to Susen, the primary metric of success for the dressing isn’t sales, though they’ll certainly be tracking how quickly bottles sell out. “Primarily, this is for us measuring engagement,” he said. “First and foremost, what do the fans think?”

Continue reading here.—KH

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Gabie Kur is SVP at Codeword, a creative communications agency. She’s worked at companies including Outbrain and BAM Communications throughout her career.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? It’s difficult to pick a “favorite child,” especially having worked with close to 100 brands of all different sizes. But there’s something to be said about the longevity of a relationship, especially when you work in the volatile tech and startup industry. I’ve been working alongside Coway, a global leader in health-minded home appliances (particularly air purifiers), as their external comms lead for the better half of a decade. We started working together when they were first launching in the US almost 10 years ago, bringing one smart air purifier to the market when air quality was not à la mode as it is now in the post-pandemic era.

It’s been extremely rewarding seeing the evolution of the company and our press strategy go from a very aggressive grind to get into every gift guide that existed and convince reviewers that they should be reviewing air purifiers to being named the top air purifier brand across the board in almost every guide and review on the subject that exists on the Internet. As a PR person, you don’t always get to see the fruits of your labor develop in that way, and so it’s likely been the most gratifying program to grow alongside.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I love Upwork’s #MotherhoodWorks campaign, which advocates for making the corporate environment more conducive to working moms, especially those looking to reenter the workforce. Becoming a working mom myself during the pandemic was an extremely eye-opening experience to the way that work environments in their current state do not serve us. It’s become a passion of mine as a leader to find ways to change that, both where I work, and in the broader community. Seeing a brand provide resources and use their platform for a public plea to the same effect really resonated with me.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? Earned media will out-earn paid media: Ad spend is continuing to reflect lighter wallets as more brands prepare for economic uncertainty. But just because budgets are tightening doesn’t mean brands want to go full dark mode. Since no capital is needed for earned media placement (just the specialized time of some smart PR people), the brands that invest in earned media will win when the tides turn. Plus, at a time when consumers (both B2B and B2C) may not have the funds to buy from brands, the next best thing is reading about your products and bookmarking the spend for later.

While I am guilty of falling down the doomscroll rabbit hole of short-form video content à la TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, I’m not convinced this is our generation’s strongest future of communication and storytelling. Plus, brands have a tendency to ruin most things. So, with brands starting to oversaturate platforms like TikTok, combined with consumers realizing junk-food consumption of small-bite content is not good for their brains, I’m expecting this craze to fizzle out.

Brands like Glossier are increasingly introducing vegan versions of their products, but consumers aren’t always receptive to these changes. Retail Brew’s Erin Cabrey recently explored the issues brands can face when jumping into “clean” beauty. Read part of her story below, or click here for the full read.

In pop music, artists who release not-so-FCC-friendly songs make “clean” versions for the radio, while the profanity-laden original is still available to fans who want it. The same isn’t true in the beauty industry; when beauty brands release a “clean” version of a product, the original is typically scrapped, leaving some consumers high and dry.

The most recent example of this is Glossier, which announced last month its plan to reformulate its bestselling Balm Dotcom lip balm to be vegan. The product, introduced as one of the brand’s first four products in 2014, is now made without lanolin, and replacing beeswax with synthetic beeswax, and petrolatum—the first ingredient in its ingredient list—with castor jelly.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

: Read up on ways to improve your organization’s lead-generation chops.

: These newsletter templates and other resources can help level up your email marketing game.

: Here are some tips for when you’re feeling all out of ideas for social posts.

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This year’s Super Bowl halftime show performer is Rihanna. Which artist’s halftime performance brought in the most viewers?

1. Beyoncé
2. Madonna
3. Bruno Mars
4. Katy Perry

Keep scrolling for the answer.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Why the fractional CMO position seems to be catching on
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