The Crocs brand is a fan favorite across the globe—tapping into niche interests and maintaining a fun and engaging social presence. Crocs has been building cultural cache through collabs with fan favorites like Post Malone and Aespa for years, but they are more than just a fad. To be a brand that maintains relevance, they needed to find new ways to authentically engage with culture by staying connected to their fans and matching their energy on social.
To do so, Crocs needed to be equal parts fun and fast. Together, we worked with Crocs to develop a mechanism for keeping a true pulse on social conversations to find the right moment for Crocs to enter the chat. So when Crocs shoes were compared to rats in NYC, we seized our opportunity.
CBS posted a TikTok video featuring a New York resident addressing the city’s rat problem, where she compares the size of the rats in her neighborhood to a Crocs size 8 shoe. Our team spotted the video within 2 hours of its posting and immediately noticed the climbing engagement and potential virality. Crocs is constantly on the lookout for authentic and quick ways to engage with trends—and this moment was too good to pass up. With more than 3MM organic engagements on the initial video, Crocs wasn’t about to miss out on the opportunity to take ownership of this moment and drop a highly anticipated response.
Thus, the NYC Rat Starter Pack was born. In just under 36 hours, we worked closely with Crocs to ideate, shoot, edit, and legally clear a piece of content that was then shared on Crocs’ Instagram and TikTok accounts as an official response to the viral video. A simple comment wasn’t enough for us to respond to this video, so we took inspiration from the trending Starter Pack meme to create our own NYC Rat Starter Pack. Not only did we tap into the virality of the original video, but we leaned into a culturally-driven meme to shape our content strategy, drawing inspiration from how Crocs’ fans engage on social.
And we didn’t stop with social posts. We also worked with Crocs to create a custom flash promo code, “crocsizedrats,” for a limited-time discount on the site for anyone who engaged with our NYC Rat Starter Pack social post. And of course, we couldn't do a traditional discount—we had to pay homage to the rats who got us here by giving fans who spotted our response 28% off (Get it...Size 8 Rats?) for 48 hours.
Rat Size Crocs is a share worthy example of the collapsed funnel in action in a culturally relevant way. We leaned into a real-time response moment on social to drive tangible business results. The activation set a new precedent for Crocs, leading to success across multiple digital touchpoints, all while encouraging more quick-turn, full-funnel activations inspired by socially-driven cultural trends going forward.
The Rat Size Crocs activation once again proved Crocs’ status as a culturally relevant brand that authentically shows up and engages with fans on social in a uniquely ownable way.
It also proved our virality hunch was right, with the Rat Sized Crocs post garnering 1.2MM impressions, 4.7K total shares, and 47K engagements—all with no paid media or boosting. It also earned Crocs another 137K new followers across social media!
Not only did this organic viral moment turn into a culturally relevant moment for Crocs, but it also converted social engagement into sales, with over 1400 pairs of Crocs sold in under 48 hours via the “crocsizedrats”coupon code.
