Nutter Butter started posting deeply weird content on social media. Cookie-headed characters, surreal imagery, meme-heavy chaos with no apparent connection to peanut butter cookies. The marketing team leaned into absurdity so fully that the internet spent several weeks trying to figure out what they were doing.

Household penetration among Gen Z and Millennials went up 15% year over year.

The weirdness worked. And the reason it worked is more instructive than the tactics.

Most brand social media fails for one reason: it's safe. The brand manager, the legal team, and the executive suite have all had a look, and by the time the post goes live, any edge that might have made it interesting has been removed. The result is content that offends nobody and interests nobody.

Nutter Butter made the opposite choice. They posted content that was confusing, that people argued about, that had comment sections full of people trying to interpret what was happening. This engagement — even when it was bafflement — trained the algorithm to show the content to more people, which brought in more engagement, which created a feedback loop.

But the tactics were possible only because someone gave the team genuine permission to be weird. That's the part that's hard to copy: not the specific content format, but the organisational willingness to let something strange go out under the brand name and not intervene.

The lesson isn't "be weird on the internet." Most brands trying to copy this will produce something that's awkward rather than genuinely interesting — weirdness that hasn't earned the audience's trust yet.

The lesson is about brand confidence. Nutter Butter's content worked because it had a clear point of view and committed to it fully. The execution was chaotic, but the underlying identity wasn't. They knew what they were doing — or at least, they committed to it as if they did.

For smaller brands, this translates to a simpler question: what's the thing you genuinely believe about your industry, your product, or your audience that most of your competitors wouldn't say out loud? That's usually where the interesting content starts. It doesn't have to be surreal. It just has to be real.