Whole Foods Market

This week we were to follow another company and do a case study similar to the one I posted last week about Clif Bar & Company.  I decided to stay on my health food kick (perhaps to keep me in a good "healthy" mindset as the holidays are fast approaching) and have been studying Whole Foods Market.  My wife is a strict vegetarian and is all about healthy eating.  The days of driving through McDonald's or Taco Bell as a means of acquiring dinner are a part of my bachelor history.  While I have not become a vegetarian, I have changed my eating habits completely since meeting my wife, at first out of necessity (our first few dinner dates were quite interesting) then by choice.  Whole Foods Market was discovered when we took a routine trip to The Fresh Market in the Beachwood, Ohio area.  Now both stores are stops for us.  Whole Foods Market is all about high quality natural ingredients and organic foods.  I did look at both The Fresh Market and Whole Foods Market for this project, but Whole Food Market was hands down the winner as far as a successful social media marketing plan.

Whole Foods Website

Whole foods has a very easy to navigate, interactive website.  It is most definitely the core of their online presence.  The first thing I checked out was their company values which are clearly and simply laid out.  I went further into their declaration of interdependence:

"Our motto — Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet — emphasizes that our vision reaches far beyond just being a food retailer. Our success in fulfilling our vision is measured by customer satisfaction, Team Member excellence and happiness, return on capital investment, improvement in the state of the environment, and local and larger community support."

The site also has an entire section dedicated to product information which explains their organic outsourcing, quality standards, food safety, product recalls and more.    They were very smart to include an extensive section on recipes where you can subscribe their their rss recipes feed and create your own recipe box to keep your favorite recipes in.  My wife had fun creating her recipe box which just goes to show that she will now visit the site again.  

My favorite part of the site was the health starts here section.  Not only are they doing an excellent job promoting their name, they are also providing useful information for the common person.  If you did not know a lot about eating healthy and organic foods, this would be a great place to start.  And because this resource is connected directly to the brand, chances are you are going to shop there.

The links to their other social media outlets are clearly accessible from any part of their site making it easy to hop over to see what else they have going on.

Whole Foods Market Blog

Whole Foods blog did not disappoint.  With Thanksgiving coming this week, of course their blog is full of holiday tidbits and recipes.  One of the things that I like the most about their blog is the way that it is written.  I am the first person to ignore something that is too "wordy" or "technical."  Its not that I don't like big words, I just don't like when they are used out of context.  Whole Foods blog entry about cooking a turkey speaks to me in a way that I appreciate.  With lines like "how long does this thing have to cook" and "my turkey caught on fire. now what?" I feel like I am listening to an old friend.  

They seem to average about two entries per day by several different contributors.  All articles are nicely categorized in the right margin.  Trust me when I say you can loose a good amount of time once you start going through the different entries.  They are all useful and some even entertaining.  I was very pleased with this portion of their media. 

Whole Foods Market Facebook

Whole Foods Facebook page has earned an impressive 752,895 likes (the last time I checked).  There is not as much personal interaction between the company and the people as I would like to see.  However, the page is wildly successful.  Different things are posted throughout the day; contests, special sales, recipes, fyi health and food articles.  The posts gain a lot of comments, but I did not see all that much interaction from Whole Foods.  Every so often they will respond to a comment, but I do feel it should be more consistent.  While really looking into their Facebook page, I discovered links to social sites that I was not at all familiar with: Gowalla, Yelp, Foursquare and SCVNGR.  What I liked the most about their Facebook site were the special side tabs like recipes, wellness club, newsletter and local loans (a loan program that they offer to small, local producers).  One could spend quite a bit of time on this page as they have done an excellent job keeping you coming back for more.  

Whole Foods Market Twitter

Whole Foods Twitter page has an even larger following than their Facebook, 2,105,422 the last I checked.  Followers are blasted with four to five posts each hour.  Most tweets are food and/or recipe related and contain a link to another twitter page specific to that particular and/or similar tweets.  The main page that I explored is just the beginning to Whole Foods Twitter presence, almost all of the individual stores as well as some of the products themselves has their own Twitter space (these links can be found on their website).  This company is by far the largest the I have explored on Twitter.  

Whole Foods Market Youtube

By this point I was not at all surprised to see the well laid out Youtube page that Whole Foods has.  They joined Youtube in 2006 and have amassed 3,563 subscribers with over 2,165,700 upload views.  I really appreciated the diversity of the videos that they offer.  I learned about one of their suppliers from California, then I watched something about pasteurization, I learned how to carve a turkey (not that I'll ever get the change to), I learned some things about gluten and more.  The Whole Foods team has put together a diverse, interesting video channel that shows so much more about the company than just delicious food.  Through this media outlet, you can really learn a lot and appreciate Whole Foods that much more.

Whole Foods Market Flickr

Something that I just could not resist checking out wasWhole Foods Flickr site.  Now I can't say that if I was not doing this research that I would have been interested in checking it out.  There are almost 10,000 pictures posted on this site.  They take you on a trip to just about every Whole Foods that there is I believe.  I was super impressed with the photos and while there are not many comments on them, the number of views is high (up to 2,500 for some) which I found to be quite surprising.  Not that I don't appreciate the photos, its just that they offer so much of an online presence already that I don't have the time to look through 541 pages of photos.  But some loyal fans clearly appreciate the site, which makes the effort worthwhile for Whole Foods.

Conclusion

It does not take much to impress me but I was truly blown away by the extensive social forces of Whole Foods Market.  I was up so late some nights on their page that my wife accused me of being overtaken by their cult.  I know that it is a larger company than some, but the backbone for a successful social media campaign that they have can be followed and reduced to fit any business plan.  It starts with organization, clarity and simplicity and these are things that we all need to thrive.