The Hershey Company

In the world of consumer brands, The Hershey Company manages some of the most recognizable names in snacking while constantly seeking new ways to understand what consumers want. Paige Walker, Manager of Cultural Intelligence and Trends, faced the challenge of turning a vast stream of consumer conversations into actionable insights that could inform brand health, innovation, and decisions across the business.

Expanded social listening into cultural, category, competitive, and innovation intelligence

Turned consumer feedback into actionable insights throughout the product lifecycle

Helped a small team answer more questions and deliver insights faster

Automated recurring analysis with custom agents and scheduled insight delivery

The Hershey Company manages some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including Hershey’s, Reese’s, and Kit Kat. Every product launch, campaign, commercial, and company announcement generates a vast amount of consumer conversation across social media, forums, blogs, and other online sources.

A small team of social intelligence experts was responsible for turning those conversations into useful insights for Consumer Insights, Brand Marketing, Corporate Communications, creative teams, social strategists, and other stakeholders. As demand for social data grew, the team needed a way to answer more business questions without adding more manual work.

The Hershey Company uses Quid to understand how consumers feel about its brands, products, campaigns, competitors, and emerging cultural topics. Quid brings together conversations from sources including Reddit, X, Bluesky, blogs, websites, and other online channels, giving the team a broader view of consumer sentiment and behavior.

Quid supports the team throughout the innovation lifecycle. Before a product launches, analysts can identify whether consumers are asking for a particular flavor, experimenting with similar ingredients, or sharing recipes that signal demand. These insights can then be shared with Innovation and R&D.

After launch, the team can analyze positive, negative, and neutral reactions while exploring the specific product attributes consumers discuss, such as taste and texture. The findings help teams understand what worked, identify potential improvements, and decide what to do next.

Quid Terminal also gives the team a faster starting point for urgent or unexpected questions. Users can quickly explore the sentiment, themes, and conversations surrounding a brand, competitor, or topic, then decide whether deeper analysis is needed.

Over more than six years, The Hershey Company expanded its use of Quid from brand-level social listening into cultural intelligence, foresight, category analysis, and competitive intelligence.

Quid Terminal helped the company make insights more accessible across teams while reducing pressure on a small group of experts. Custom agents extended that value by allowing the team to automate analysis around its specific priorities and schedule the latest insights for delivery directly to stakeholders’ inboxes.

The partnership also went beyond technology. Walker described Quid’s customer service as a “five out of five star experience,” with the Quid team helping build topics, answer questions, support projects, and train users whenever additional expertise was needed.