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For brands that are known around the world, consumer feedback never stops. Every product launch, campaign, commercial, and company announcement creates a new wave of conversations across social channels, forums, blogs, and other online sources. The challenge is turning that volume into a clear view of what consumers think and what the business should do next.
As Manager of Cultural Intelligence and Trends at The Hershey Company, Paige Walker uses Quid every day to help answer those questions. Over more than six years and several roles, her use of Quid grew alongside her remit, moving from brand-level social listening to cultural intelligence, foresight, category analysis, and competitive intelligence.
Brand health may be one of the foundational applications of social listening, but for household names such as Reese’s, Hershey’s, and Kit Kat, it is also business-critical. The Hershey Company needs to understand how consumers feel today, how they respond when something new reaches the market, and what they want to see next.
Quid gives the team a quick way to track sentiment, conversation volume, top engaged posts, and the themes shaping each response. That means a new product, campaign, or company announcement can be assessed using honest, unfiltered feedback from consumers, not only reactions to the brand’s owned content.
The value of that insight begins well before a product appears on a shelf. When The Hershey Company explores a potential innovation, the team can use Quid to see whether consumers are already asking for an idea, experimenting with similar flavor combinations, or sharing recipes that signal interest. Those findings can then help inform Innovation and R&D.
Once a product launches, the same process helps close the loop. For a launch such as the Reese’s Oreo Cup, the team can examine positive, negative, and neutral reactions, then dig into the product attributes consumers discuss, including taste and texture. Because Quid brings together conversations from sources including Reddit, X, Bluesky, blogs, and websites, the team can build a broader view of the response.
The result is a continuous feedback cycle. Strong reactions can validate an idea and help support its future. Critical feedback can point to specific opportunities for reformulation or refinement. Either way, consumer conversation becomes useful input for the next business decision.
Demand for social data extends far beyond one function. Walker regularly worked with Consumer Insights, Brand Marketing, Corporate Communications, creative teams, and social strategists. With only a small number of subject-matter experts supporting large global brands, the volume of questions could quickly exceed the team’s capacity.
Quid Terminal became what Walker called a “huge unlock.” It gave the team a way to quickly establish a starting point on a brand, competitor, topic, or sentiment question. A top-line answer could satisfy an urgent request, including the occasional question arriving at 3 p.m. on a Friday, while promising themes could be flagged for deeper analysis later.
Its user-friendly experience also opened the door for colleagues to explore insights themselves. Instead of every question flowing through one expert, more teams could engage with the data and follow their own curiosity.
Custom agents in Quid Terminal take that scalability a step further. Since every business has different priorities, The Hershey Company can tailor agents around the conversations and questions that matter most, without rebuilding the same detailed analysis each time.
Scheduled delivery makes those insights easier to operationalize. Teams can receive updates daily, weekly, or at another chosen cadence, putting the latest findings directly into their inboxes. For a capacity-constrained insights function, that automation reduces setup work while making consistent monitoring easier to maintain.
Technology was only part of the experience. Walker described Quid’s customer service as “five out of five stars” and viewed her longtime Quid contact, Courtney Prabhakar, as a business partner. Whether the team needed help with a specific capability, support building a topic, or hands-on training, Quid was ready to step in.
That level of partnership helped The Hershey Company keep moving when requests piled up or a project stretched beyond the team’s available time and expertise. Rather than simply pointing users toward a help article, the Quid team could help complete the work and teach users how to do it themselves the next time.
Over the years, Quid has continued to support The Hershey Company as its needs evolved from monitoring brand conversations to answering larger questions about culture, categories, competitors, and the future. It continues to give a lean team the reach to serve more stakeholders, the flexibility to explore new questions, and the continuity to connect early consumer signals with post-launch performance.
Most importantly, it helps them turn a vast and fast-moving stream of consumer conversation into themes people across the company could understand and use. That is how listening becomes intelligence, and intelligence becomes action.
Learn how Quid can help your team monitor brand health, uncover emerging needs, and scale insight across the business.
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