Faced with increasing competition in the snack aisle, Snyder's of Hanover launched an integrated campaign to remind hungry Americans about the classic, salty pretzel. The campaign centred around a middle-aged, female ‘hard-man’, who was aggressively insistent on the superiority of pretzels. The ‘Pretzels, Baby’ lady took her tough tone to Twitter, where she responded to tweets about snacks and pretzels with borderline-aggressive suggestions that people buy some Snyder’s. This culminated in a Twitter war between the brand’s spokeswoman and TV personality Andy Richter, with the latter being banned from pretzels for life. The exchange garnered 18,000 engagements and helped increase sales by 6% year-on-year.

Trolls are near-omnipresent across social media platforms and forums, purposefully seeking to derail how people and brands communicate; 28% of American adults admit to ‘malicious online activity directed at somebody they didn’t know’, while 12% say they’ve made deliberately controversial statements. Now that trolls are everywhere, brands are faced with a choice – ignore or engage.

As its interactions were mostly innocuous – in trolling terms at least – Snyder’s digital engagement during the ‘Pretzels, Baby’ campaign paid off, helping portray the brand as having a sense of humour and an understanding of online behaviour. Given that trolling is generally gendered male – men are more likely to get into a malicious argument than women – Snyder’s use of a middle-aged spokeswoman in a bad wig is even more sardonic.

Armed with sharp-witted social media teams, brands such as Wendy’s and Verizon have won the hearts and minds of customers by ignoring the mantra ‘don’t feed the trolls’ and facing – or even provoking – naysayers. But branded comebacks can just as easily backfire. Luckily, Snyder’s stays on the right side of mischievous by adopting the tone without the vitriol.

This is the second in a five-part series deconstructing our favourite winners from the 2017 Clio Awards.