Dunkin’ Donuts versus Krispy Kreme – It’s The Doughnut Day Knockout

National Doughnut Day, it’s like all the Christmas’s, New Years’ and Birthdays have come at once for marketers of doughnut brands. For the two biggest brands in the doughnut space, Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, can there be a more important date in the calendar than the first Friday of June?

Of the two super brands, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts had a 13 year headstart over Dunkin’ Donuts but the latter now has more outlets across more countries. On social media, Dunkin’ Donuts is winning in terms of raw fan numbers, although it should be noted that they recently switched over to using global pages and regional pages have been rolled in to one. Krispy Kreme still maintains individual regional pages, but in this report we only looked at their US page.

In terms of fan growth, both brands have rather forgettable numbers, neither beating the sector average of 0.5% fan growth per month. It’s almost as if the brands have reached some kind of Peak Fan. Growth will be sluggish, so the attention has to turn to engaging those fans.

When it comes to fan interaction, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is doing the better job of engaging fans. Unmetric uses a combination of Likes, Comments, Shares and Estimated Impressions to determine an Engagement Score for each post. Using this score, Krispy Kreme scored an average of 84 for the period analyzed while Dunkin’ Donuts scored 56.

Diving a little deeper, it was found that Krispy Kreme focused their efforts on posting photos of doughnuts while Dunkin’ Donuts liked to mix things up and talk about their other products. As it turns out, posts with photos of doughnuts engage far higher than those without. Infact, when Dunkin’ Donuts posts photos of its drinks or breakfast sandwiches, the response barely registers a ‘meh’ from the fans on the engagement scale of things.

Dunkin’ Donuts loves to leverage the bizarre and unusual days of the year, for example Eat What You Want Day or National Teacher’s Day. It also runs a fan of the week contest, which is great for building brand loyalty but the posts are amongst the least engaging of all its content.

Krispy Kreme, on the other hand, has an almost laser like focus with its content. It’s doughnuts all the way. It leverages its classic Dozens box in almost every other post along with talking constantly about the weekend, both of which engage well with the audience – an indication that Krispy Kreme fans are all about living for the weekend?! Amongst the least engaging posts were photos of new store openings and its trademark Chiller drinks (post since removed). Again, these non-doughnut posts were barely able to elicit a Like out of the fans.

Check out the full report in the infographic below. We think the pixels are good enough to eat!

It does appear that National Doughnut Day is celebrated and pushed more by Dunkin’ Donuts than Krispy Kreme. This is inline with their broader content strategy of celebrating the cute and the bizarre holidays. Krispy Kreme, on the other hand, appears to have removed their single post about Doughnut Day, which is unusual.

Methodology

All data has been compiled and analyzed from the Unmetric platform for the period of May, 2013. Engagement Score is a calculation of the Likes, Comments, Shares and Estimated Impressions a post receives. The Unmetric Score is a benchmarkable score based on various qualitative and quantitative metrics. Get access to all this data and more, sign up for your 6 day free trial.