5 years in, the brand ROI from sorority rush is only growing

In 2021, RushTok captivated audiences as PNMs (potential new members) posted their OOTDs (outfits of the day) that made their way to the FYP (For You page, though hopefully you already knew that one).

The initialism-laden social media phenomenon, which started largely at the University of Alabama before eventually spreading to college campuses across the country, documents the experience of sorority recruitment. It has skyrocketed otherwise unknown college-aged women to overnight influencer status and quickly earned a place on the internet’s cultural calendar, with RushTok videos generating billions of views every year.

Five years later, the phenomenon doesn’t seem to be going anywhere—and in fact, brand presence is increasing, further cementing rush’s off-campus influence. Beverage company Poppi has made repeat appearances during recruitment season, while newcomers like Lucky Charms, Kitsch, and Nike are signing on to the hype for the first time.

For brands, the sorority rush playground isn’t just about connecting with a college audience anymore. Rather, marketers we spoke to say it’s one of the best places to build both current cultural resonance and potential lifelong brand loyalists.

“Brands have evolved from being present to having an episodic, real commercial role in what rush looks like,” Christy Kelly, executive director of strategy and innovation at MMC, told us. “[Sorority women have] observed the brand integrations bubbling in the last couple years, and this year, we’ve seen these women grab it by the horns.”

Brands in the house

Today’s rush brands aren’t waiting around for a potential name-drop in OOTD videos. They’re often going straight to the sorority chapters, which start making videos in the days leading up to official recruitment week, known as Work Week. Companies like Poppi may begin seeding their products and providing services to women already in the social clubs with the understanding their brands could likely feature in upcoming social content.

Sophia Sesto, Poppi’s VP of culture, said the company’s marketing department built a college team three years ago due to an influx of inbound requests from sorority chapters for Poppi products. For the probiotic-soda brand, it’s never been hard to find sorority partners, and one year’s collaboration can lead to ongoing partnership.

“We want to fill as many requests as we can,” Sesto told us. “General brand and excitement and engagement is really, really big, so some of the sororities that we sent and surprised talent with this year were some of our most engaged partners last year.”

Over the years, Poppi’s rush involvement has increased in both volume and scale. This year, Sesto said the brand will exceed last year’s sampling numbers and plans to send more than a million cans to sororities, as well as 20,000 pieces of custom merch; beyond that, the brand is facilitating special appearances from pop culture figures like Love Island USA’s runners-up Carl Schmidt and Aniya Harvey and Rob Rausch from The Traitors. Together, these efforts can account for between 30% and 40% of the brand’s back-to-school marketing budget, Sesto told us.

Connecting sorority chapters with pop culture figures is a key way Sesto thinks about building a connection that can last beyond rush week. To her, the experiences that Poppi can bring to enhance the sorority recruitment experience are part of the ongoing investment in relationship-building.

“We want you to have the best Work Week, the best Bid Day,” she said. “Just going the extra mile and actually thinking, not from the brand lens, but from the human lens of, ‘How would I want to experience something like this? If a brand were to come in, what ways would we be so excited to engage with, or want to post or talk about?’”

What about the brands that aren’t already on so many sorority women’s wish lists? For Lucky Charms, there was a smaller sorority niche to tap into. The cereal brand hasn’t historically targeted the college crowd, Megan Brooks, business unit director for family favorite cereals at General Mills, told us, but it was already showing up organically in some Kappa Delta chapters’ themes and social content due to the organization’s connection with the shamrock motif.

This year, Lucky Charms capitalized, making its presence more visually noticeable through a partnership with decor company Presley Paige to create brand elements via balloon art at the University of Arkansas’s Kappa Delta chapter. At Bid Day, when new members officially join the organization, there were also branded activities like bracelet-making stations.

Lucky Charms didn’t have any official creator partnerships with the Kappa Delta chapter members, Brooks said, which made it more important to ensure its activations were captivating on their own.

“We knew that we wanted to create elements that we thought that they would want to create organic content around,” she said. “These women are—it’s incredible how talented they are, frankly, at pulling together content that’s really engaging.”

Brooks said Lucky Charms approached this year’s rush season strategically, viewing all the women involved as potential content creators. What she didn’t plan for was the UGC that came from passersby impressed with the brand’s decorative approach, which ended up being an additional brand awareness benefit.

“The University of Arkansas is known for, especially during Bid Day, the decor of these houses,” she said. “There’s people who go through the streets and show all the houses and comment on them and talk about them, and then people who are watching and having their own comments and thoughts about what’s happening during rush.”

Girls run the world

As brand presence becomes more synonymous with rush season, Kelly said marketers have a chance to build a relationship with college-aged Gen Z women that lasts well beyond the college years. Last month, MMC’s Weathervaine released a report called Rush Money that details insights from this year’s recruitment cycle for marketers to consider, including the increasing economic considerations that come from participating in sorority recruitment that brands can build associations with early.

“If done properly, the real ROI of sorority rush for brands is establishing long-term partnerships and relationships with a community that is, at this vulnerable time, ready to receive them,” Kelly said. “When you meet high stakes with something useful, that’s when that brand loyalty is built.”

Gen Z women continue to become a considerable economic force. Though women broadly are still outearned by their male counterparts, a 2022 report from the Pew Research Center based on Census Bureau data found that the gender wage gap among younger workers was narrowing on a national scale, and in cities like New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, women under age 30 earned the same amount or more than men.

As college-aged women move past their sorority days into later life stages, Kelly said that relationships that brands build now could inform how to continue to appeal to them down the road, especially as spending power grows and more significant purchases loom.

“[Rush is] one of the first professional building blocks that these young women have, so there’s a lot to be learned because we start to see the steps they take to help put themselves together,” Kelly said. “As we follow these women to their first job interviews…their first home purchase, we understand that in high-stakes moments, there are elements that they care about, people they lean on, and ways that they are trying to build, and so the way that brands think about empowering these women to build early enables them to go along that whole journey well beyond rush.”