Why BelliWelli’s co-founder and CEO is filming skits in Walmart at night

What if your product was so beloved that customers would fight over it?

That’s the foundational concept for many of the online skits that Belliwelli CEO and co-founder Katie Wilson produces for the fiber supplement brand.

The videos feature captions like “Watch her have a MELTDOWN at Walmart”; “Watch her SNAP at Walmart today”; and “She was SO rude to him,” which seem designed to get viewers on social media to stop scrolling and pay attention to the brand’s short-form content. On TikTok, the brand has 1.1 million followers; it has 318,000 followers on Instagram and 44,000 followers on Facebook.

BelliWelli’s content strategy, according to Wilson, is based on creating “memetic content,” or, as she put it, “content that causes you to think, ‘What is that? What’s going on? Why do people want it? Why are they reacting this way?’”

“Anytime you can get somebody asking themselves those questions, it does convert to sales, believe it or not,” Wilson told Marketing Brew.

The content often centers around customers dramatically jockeying for the fiber brand’s product in the checkout line, which Wilson believes encourages viewers to question why the customers in the skits are so passionate—even angry—about the product being taken from them. It probably doesn’t hurt that fiber is having a bit of a moment in broader conversations about healthy dietary habits.

The hope is that potential customers watching those skits might, after watching, have similar feelings that lead them to purchase their own BelliWelli products.

“We’ve never been afraid of cringe,” Wilson said. “We know that cringe is what stands out and what gets eyeballs. And so as long as we can tell a story about it driving to retail, we’re not afraid of cringe.”

To skit, or not to skit

Creating content that will get people to actually pay attention is table stakes for marketers, and one of the methods that some have employed in recent years is ragebait. It’s an easy way to game the algorithm and get attention, but it’s not always intentional—or welcome.

BelliWelli, Wilson said, isn’t out to create ragebait—even if some of the captions might look like it. Rather, the goal is to release “lighthearted and fun skits,” as the company’s TikTok bio states, that people actually may want to watch. To that end, the skits are not run as paid ads but as organic content, Wilson said.

Striking a balance between content that’s entertaining and will move the needle is a difficulty that may be familiar to many marketers, particularly in a fractured advertising ecosystem. “I think brands are really challenged right now with trying to figure out, ‘How do we entertain?’ Right? No one wants to see more ads anymore,” Wilson said. “No one wants to feel like they’re getting marketed to. So it’s like this fine line between, ‘How do you go entertain and stay on brand?’”

Behind-the-scenes

Wilson oversees those content-creation efforts directly. The skits that BelliWelli produces today are unscripted and usually improvised on the spot, often inside a Walmart, using a rotating group of some 65 actors that the company works with on the short-form videos.

Early on, Wilson set up in Walmarts nightly to film real-life interactions with customers, Wilson told us, but over time, the strategy has evolved to working with real actors to create content, which is shot on an iPhone and which Wilson edits herself. BelliWelli has also worked with various creators for skits where the product is seemingly dumped into the creator’s beverage without permission—another tactic designed to stop viewers in their tracks and watch to find out what happens next. One video with creator Haley Kalil featuring the text overlay “Her face the moment she realized…” originally posted last year has more than 525,000 likes.

While it isn’t typical for a CEO to also serve as a social media producer, Wilson sees it as a crucial part of her job.

“We can’t afford for this to break,” Wilson said. “It drives so much retail traffic.”

The proximity to customers when filming is another plus: Wilson said she interacts with customers “every single time” she is filming content at stores.

“I keep an incredibly close pulse on the category, who’s shopping the category, why they’re shopping the category, what they’re reaching for, what they’re not,” Wilson said. “It has this added benefit of keeping me incredibly close to the product and the customer.”