NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - September 21, 2017) - Americans love to talk about their food. In fact, "#Food" has been hashtagged on Instagram more than 235 million times alone. To help food marketers better understand the conversations taking place about today's top food brands, both online and offline, Engagement Labs has released its TotalSocial^® rankings on the top-performing food brands in the U.S. with respect to consumer conversations.

The report looks at how major food brands have performed socially over the past six months, and is a follow up to the Company's first analysis of the top ranking food brands in March 2017. According to Engagement Labs' report, three new food brands -- Oreo, Perdue Chicken and Kraft -- have made their debut in the top-ten TotalSocial rankings, while Heinz, Pillsbury and Nestlé have fallen off the top ten.

The analysis, which combines offline (face-to-face) and online (social media) consumer conversations, is based on Engagement Labs' proprietary TotalSocial data, which continuously measures the most important drivers of brand performance in terms of social media and word of mouth conversations.

"Quaker Oats jumped several spots to become the top TotalSocial brand over the past six months. While the company remained stable with respect to offline consumer conversations, it was their online campaigns that catapulted to them to the top spot," said Ed Keller, CEO of Engagement Labs. "Over the past six months, Quaker has given their online community a lot to talk about and share -- from the launch of their 140th anniversary campaign to debuting innovative products such as single-serve Overnight Oats."

Oreo, which was previously ranked #20, moved up to the third spot on the TotalSocial top-ten list. Within the past six months, the Company leapfrogged its competition to become a "Conversation Commander," a brand that has above-average scores both offline and online. With such creative campaigns as #MyOreoCreation, the brand really focused on improving its online / digital performance over the past six months. As a result, online volume score increased by 25 percent, indicating that consumers are talking more about the brand via social media compared to six months ago. In addition, the company's online brand sharing score, the amount of online conversations in which people are talking about a brand's owned social media content, more than doubled.

Conversely, Heinz dropped in its TotalSocial ranking from #3 to #17. This drop stems from the decline in its online and offline sentiment score, indicating consumers are speaking negatively about the company in their face-to-face conversations and via social media mentions.

"The TotalSocial ranking should be a wake-up call for Heinz to rethink its marketing strategies," commented Keller. "This significant drop in sentiment, combined with low offline volume scores, indicates that consumers aren't talking about the brand and when they do, it isn't positive. It's time to add some spice to the condiment's marketing strategy."

To learn more about Engagement Labs and how to increase your brand's word of mouth in real life and online, reach out at: [email protected].

About Engagement Labs

Engagement Labs (TSX VENTURE: EL) provides the world's leading brands with a unique and powerful data and technology solution to drive sales growth and improve marketing ROI. Our TotalSocial^® technology combines online social media listening metrics with the world's only ongoing measurement of offline word-of-mouth conversations into a single dashboard, to provide marketers with the ability to measure performance, diagnose areas of weakness and opportunity and identify specific strategies and tactics to increase sales and improve marketing ROI. TotalSocial is an "always-on" proprietary scoring system, based on the most important drivers of brand performance: Volume, Sentiment, Brand Sharing and Influence. TotalSocial tracks 500 brands across 16 major industry categories within the U.S., and 350 brands across 18 industry categories in the UK.

To learn more visit www.engagementlabs.com / www.totalsocial.com.

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