Inside King Arthur Baking’s Customer Experience Playbook

Meet Ben Rapson: Theater kid turned social strategist

[00:00:00] 

Brooke Sellas: Today I am thrilled to welcome my friend Ben Rapson, who is the social media marketing manager at King Arthur Baking. Ben combines a passion for baking with a knack for building a vibrant digital communities. Under his leadership, King Arthur has become a go-to resource for both expert bakers and curious beginners.

Let’s explore how he’s using social media to connect, inspire, and convert customers.

[00:00:30] Welcome to the Social Media CX Podcast, where social media meets customer experience and where all fires, no rainbows is the current reality for most brands. I’m Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media, and I’m on a mission to change that. Social media can be the MVP of your CX strategy, and I’m here to show you how.

Each week we’ll tackle the [00:01:00] challenges of social care. Head on with candid interviews, real world case studies, and actionable advice to turn your social channels into loyalty, building revenue driving dopamine machines. Whether you’re managing customer complaints, trying to engage meaningfully are just tired of missing dms.

This podcast is your guide to putting out the fires and building the rainbows.

Brooke Sellas: Ben, [00:01:30] welcome to the show.

Ben Rapson: Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s so good to see you. And hello to everyone listening and watching.

Brooke Sellas: You’re so sweet. We had the pleasure of seeing each other back in, was that March or April? March.

Ben Rapson: Let’s say April, what is time? But also let’s say April, yeah.

Brooke Sellas: April. And how did you, how did you fare at Social Media Marketing World? Did you have a good time?

Ben Rapson: Oh, I had a great time.

Brooke Sellas: Yes.

Ben Rapson: I loved all of the experts. I loved the presentations by [00:02:00] folks who really have, you know, boots on the ground, so to speak. And it was great to meet a lot of new folks from both small businesses, big brands, you know and I thought your presentation was literally the best one so.

Brooke Sellas: Oh my gosh, I paid him to say that. So today we’re gonna be tackling this central question or theme. How does a heritage brand like King Arthur baking leverage social media to create authentic connections that translate [00:02:30] into business results? And you’re gonna help us answer that question, Ben.

So let’s start first though with your, your background and your expertise. How did you get into social media marketing? ‘Cause I know it was a different journey previous to King Arthur Baking, and then how did it lead into King Arthur Baking?

Ben Rapson: So I started doing social media marketing when social media started. I was a drama student at the University of Washington in 2004 [00:03:00] when Zuckerberg decided to let not just Ivy League schools, but also state schools in on the game. So I was one of the first folks to use Facebook. And I was in the theater department, so right away I started trying to use these connections and tools and features to put butts in seats in the plays that I was producing and directing and starring in.

And every time some new thing came out, you know, oh, now there’s events. Oh, now there’s a wall. Oh, now there’s this and [00:03:30] that.

Brooke Sellas: Oh my.

Ben Rapson: I know. I know. So I know, right? So every time something new came out, I would just try and figure out how to increase my connections or how to make a network or just how to promote the stuff that was going on in the theater department.

After college, I made a theater and film company with a bunch of my friends. Also in Seattle, and we used social media to build a big fan base there on the fringe theater circuit. Made a bunch of weird art and packed the houses. [00:04:00] And I started going freelance as well as working for a large theater, doing marketing downtown Seattle.

Met a bunch of other folks who were marketing but you know, had been assigned the social media. You know, when Twitter first started being a thing for businesses and before Instagram was even born, and so we were part of a little group called the Seattle Twitterati, and we met for sushi once a month.

And exchanged notes and, you know, how are you doing this? [00:04:30] And what if we did that and, you know, taught each other kind of collectively. So I worked freelance at a my own agency and then another agency called Fin Pig in Seattle. And I had, you know, years and years of work from home experience and did a lot of travel and worked at a Native American resort, casino and cultural center.

Worked for a bunch of hotels internationally, a bunch of bars and restaurants. A big dance hall on Capitol Hill, a underground cider [00:05:00] bar that had only gluten-free options everywhere. And they called their Brussels sprouts micro cabbage. So.

Brooke Sellas: You’ve done it all.

Ben Rapson: You know, I’ve done it all. I also have used advertising when that came out right from the beginning.

Used the Facebook pixel and all the different dashboards that have come since then. And obviously every time a new major social media channel breakthrough. I’m there. I’m there to make it work for the businesses and the brands that [00:05:30] I represent. And then in 2018, I moved to Vermont.

I left Seattle for the green pastures of where I live now in Vermont. You can see the proof of wallpaper behind me is in my 1870 Villa and I basically live in the Shire. It’s nothing but rolling hills and people drinking beer.

Brooke Sellas: It’s nothing but a good time. 

Ben Rapson: It’s a good time.

T here you go. [00:06:00] It wasn’t very long after I moved to Vermont that King Arthur Baking reached out and said, “Hey, we’d love someone with your experience to be on our team locally.” You know, not a remote position from across the country.

I used my wife’s incredible baking actually. She baked a cake with a bourbon glaze that I brought to my final interview at King Arthur, and served plate by plate, the people who were considering me and somehow got the job. Go figure.

Brooke Sellas: Weird.[00:06:30] 

Ben Rapson: I know, and that was 2019.

Aligning social with King Arthur’s brand values

Ben Rapson: So I’ve been at King Arthur ever since. It’s been my full-time gig. So you know, I have gone through a bunch of enormous growth as a company and we’ve seen that growth, you know, in terms of how many people in America are learning to bake, learning to, to make their own bread or their own bread. Make their own, you know, desserts or all kinds of things and bake for their communities and their friends and family.

And it’s [00:07:00] really a very holistically wonderful company. We are a B Corp, so a benefit corporation that works for the good of the planet. We’re employee owned a hundred percent. And it’s a really cool culture we have here. And I have a great social media team, so I’m the manager.

I have a strategist who handles the organic calendar on all channels and copywriting and coordination for what goes up each day. And then we have a three person digital engagement [00:07:30] team who responds. They really are there seven days a week to respond to questions, comments, please help me, my cake broke, whatever it might be.

So they’re big, they’re baking experts as well as social media experts and uniquely suited. And they’re full of puns, which really has become part of our trademark on social. So yeah, it’s a really good job. I like it a lot.

Brooke Sellas: This is why I wanted to have been on the show. If you haven’t recognized this already, obviously King Arthur [00:08:00] Baking is doing it all right. This is such a brand to align yourself with and emulate if you’re trying

You’re trying to or do social the right way. It’s changed, right?

It has changed. So it used to be so different, as you said, but now it really is all about helping people and having these conversations to align with your customers and wouldbe customers. Ben, does King Arthur align its [00:08:30] social strategy with its brand values of quality, community, sustainability?

How does that flow into digital?

Ben Rapson: You know, it for me comes down to the internal phrase that has been around since I joined. You know, every week we have what we call town meeting where everybody in the company who’s available joins a call with the CEO. And ever since I joined, they’ve been using the phrase knowledge and inspiration.

Knowledge + inspiration as CX pillars

Brooke Sellas: Hmm.

Ben Rapson: And [00:09:00] that is basically at the heart of it, it’s that, you know, we sell baking products. We’re not just a flour company. We are a baking company. We sell all manner of ingredients and hard goods and tools and pans and all the things. And we don’t just sell it to you and then say, “okay, good luck. Bye forever.” We wanna teach you how to use it.

We want you to know how to make what you want to get better at it, to explore more things to bake. You know, over the years that’s also included you [00:09:30] know, gluten-free, which is better than ever. Oh my gosh. And all these other different kind of, you know, slices of the proverbial pie.

So knowledge and inspiration has gone from, at its core, let’s not just sell the products, let’s teach people how to use them. That’s why we have a website with an enormous amount of recipes as well as guides and lessons and you know, instructions on kind of how to get better at. And a blog that’s just always releasing really awesome [00:10:00] information, tips, tricks, trends, all that stuff.

But we also have forever we’ve had a Baker’s hotline, a seven day a week free phone number that you can call in, and there’s dozens of expert bakers that are around the country, literally sitting at home talking to people who need help with their baked goods. So it’s on the side of all of our packages.

If you buy our flour at the grocery store, you’ll see the hotline number and you can literally call any day and be like, [00:10:30] it’s not working. How do I even, you know? And so the social team, the social strategy really has always been rooted in knowledge and inspiration.

You know, we don’t have to, and frankly we don’t want to be primarily marketers and sellers of the products on social. We want to simply bring you into the fold of the baking community. Fold it in as Moira from Schitt’s Creek would say.

Brooke Sellas: How do you?

Ben Rapson: Just fold it in.

Yeah, [00:11:00] exactly. We have so many Schitt’s Creek GIFs that we share in our chats. Oh my gosh. Big fans. Big fans. If you follow us on threads, you will see that we like to comment with a whole vocabulary of Schitt’s Creek GIFs.

Brooke Sellas: Real quick, if you’re listening or watching, just real quick, we will have all of these links to King Arthur baking, to all the things, the Threads page. It’s on YouTube, I should say, in the show notes. Which are under, I’m pointing if [00:11:30] you’re watching, but if you’re listening, I’m pointing down in the transcript on YouTube, we’ll have all those links there for you.

Ben Rapson: Thank you, of course you will. You’re so savvy, why wouldn’t you?

Brooke Sellas: Why?

How King Arthur shows up online (and why it works)

Ben Rapson: Exactly, so knowledge and inspiration. We don’t just post, here’s a product. We post here’s a recipe, here’s a technique, here’s a new, you know, new obsession for you to get into. And not just that, but I think what is most striking [00:12:00] about our company and our social presence is that digital engagement team.

You know, the fact that we have three full-time bakers and customer service geniuses who are always in the comments. Whether it’s someone saying, I tried this today, it was great. And we go, well, good for you. That’s awesome. What are ya gonna try next? But also hey, this actually didn’t work so well.

What, am I doing wrong? And we are there to walk you through it and talk to you about it. [00:12:30] And always in the app, you know. And sometimes there are folks who want to talk about our brand or our values or our mission or all kinds of stuff because we are a very, you know values based organization.

And our digital engagement team is a big differentiator for us. That’s not just the fact that they come to work every day ready to help people. It’s that the organization as a whole has prioritized and said: this is the [00:13:00] kind of company we want to be. We wanna be known for being available and being helpful and being proactively assisting of whatever is going to help you bake something better.

Brooke Sellas: I wanna pause here and underscore what you’re saying because this is social media in the year 2025. I mean, it has been. But like if you are just now catching up to what Ben is saying, the reason they are so successful, the reason that they are surviving and thriving with [00:13:30] social media. Where a lot of you may not be as, from what I’m hearing out there in the socials, is that they’ve stayed ahead by having this digital engagement team. And having these conversations and being available to help their customers and would-be customers use their products.

I also know that some of your key strategies, which I’ll let you talk about we talked about previous in the green room about your UGC campaigns. We talked about, obviously, which [00:14:00] we were just touching on a bit, your educational content, but also like baking trends and things like that that y’all do.

So pick one, but let’s unpack one of those. Because I think those are all really smart strategies, especially UGC obviously, because just it fits so well with what you do.

UGC, “messy is beautiful,” and embracing amateurs

Ben Rapson: Sure. So we love to encourage user generated content. We love to encourage folks to you know, don’t just marvel at the gorgeous studio photography made by our food [00:14:30] stylist and our team of photographic wonders. But, you know, make it yourself and show us how it goes.

A big part of our brand voice really, like there’s documented, you know guidelines for the whole company that say “messy is beautiful.” You do not need to be an expert. In fact, we treasure a word that is I think often maligned or thought of as a [00:15:00] negative, which is amateur.

The idea that you should embrace being an amateur. You are not an expert. You are just someone who, you know, the heart of that word is love. That you love to do this and you do it for the love of it. And so, you know, our UGC encouragement and the way we get in the comments when someone tags us, we literally, you know, the software we use helps us identify every single [00:15:30] time someone tags us on any channel.

And we are always there within a matter of minutes to say you know, hey, this looks so good. Oh my gosh. Or we also keep track of previous comments and conversations, so you know, we’re there to say. Hey, you’re really catching on.

You’re really developing your technique. You’re really, I saw the progress you’re making from then to now. And so UGC is a big part of how we not just in an external sense, we [00:16:00] want people to know that we are cheerleaders. We’re encouragers of the practice of this craft. But also internally, you know.

Trend tracking with the Recipe of the Year 

Ben Rapson: Let’s see what people are most fond of and learn from that. Our major campaign is the recipe of the year. So we’re on our 12th, I wanna say 11th year of Recipe of the Year. And this year is our big and bubbly focaccia. And it’s a gorgeous and easy and super tall, delicious, bubbly Italian bread.

[00:16:30] It’s so good. And it can be made in all these different ways, right? But you know, each time we launch a recipe of the year and we say, okay, go bake it. It’s the new year. Please try it. Tell us what you think. Show us what it looks like. Tell us what your kids think about it.

You know, all these things. We measure very acutely. Was this as big of a hit as we thought it would be? Was this as big of a hit as it was last year or last year’s recipe of the year? Or we’ve got benchmarks for all kinds of [00:17:00] things so that we can internally measure not just how many clicks, which we do measure.

Not just how many comments, but also, you know, did this recipe take off? Did it become the trend that we thought it would be? We found this last year actually with yes, this is the 12th year. Last year was the super sized, super soft chocolate chip cookies.

Brooke Sellas: Oh my.

Ben Rapson: We were wading intro very controversial territory. Everyone’s got a chocolate chip recipe.

Brooke Sellas: Very. [00:17:30] 

Ben Rapson: You know, everyone’s got a chocolate chip cookie recipe that they got from grandma, right? Maybe grandma made that up herself, or maybe she got it from the back of the flour bag. But they love it and that’s what they want and that’s the only cookie for them, right?

So we really intentionally said we wanna be a conversation starter. We weren’t saying this is the best cookie ever. We were saying this is the cookie we are currently obsessed with. It’s large, it’s soft. It uses bread flour instead of all purpose flour.

You [00:18:00] chop your chocolate, you make a tangzhong, which is a crazy technique of cooking a little bit of flour in milk to make their resulting dough extremely soft and last longer. You brown the butter, like all these different things that make it like, I know, right? So it’s at once a extremely fussy cookie, but we love that about it. And also it’s an enormous conversation starter for all manner of not just bakers, but just people who like chocolate chip cookies and who doesn’t [00:18:30] yeah.

The psychology behind deeper digital engagement

Brooke Sellas: I love that you, I mean, Ben knows this about me, but in my minor, nerdy undergraduate thesis study on the social penetration theory.

Ben Rapson: Mm-hmm.

Brooke Sellas: Right? All about opinions and feelings and that’s how you form relationships. This is what you’re doing. You’re going, Hey, what’s your opinion about this cookie recipe? And feelings come up almost automatically with food. I don’t know, maybe, foodies like myself, that’s how it happens.

Ben Rapson: Alright.

Brooke Sellas: But feelings are so easy for me to get to with food. Like I’m already feeling all kinds of things with all this [00:19:00] bread and cookies we’ve been talking about, so I love it.

Hey Brooke here. Quick pause. If you’ve been nodding along and thinking, wow, we really need to get our social customer care together. I’ve got you. I have a new LinkedIn learning course. Yeah, me on LinkedIn. Learning still not over it. It’s called Mastering Social Media Customer Care Strategies from million and billion dollar Brands.[00:19:30] 

And it’s packed with the exact frameworks we use at B Squared to help brands boost loyalty, reduce response times, and actually connect with their customers on social. Because customer care is your brand experience and this course helps you master that without the fluff. Check it out now on LinkedIn Learning by going to https://bit.ly/B2LICare

That’s B2LICare [00:20:00] as in B2, LinkedIn, and then the word care, or just scroll down to the show notes.

Because you’re literally using, whether you know it or not, social psychology to connect with your customers and wouldbe customers.

Ben Rapson: Very much so. Yeah, we, that was one thing that we took away at Social Media Marketing World Conference in San Diego. There was a couple of different people that were saying emotion [00:20:30] drives action, you know. We were very validated by that because people bake for so many reasons.

We have an initiative internally called Bake It Easy, which is kind of the opposite of that chocolate chip cookie recipe is basically, here’s a bunch of different recipes that are easier than you think. It’s one pan or it’s only an hour, or it’s only five ingredients, or whatever it is.

And one of the internal phrases we have is life’s hard enough, so make it easy. 

Brooke Sellas: [00:21:00] I love it.

Ben Rapson: We are trying to get to the core of like people don’t just bake ’cause they’re hungry, that’s a driver. But they also bake for self-care. They bake for individual stress relief, coping, you know and to, to make their friends happy, to make their neighbors happy, to obviously to make their kids happy.

So there’s so many reasons to bake. We really try and tap into that and stay tapped into what’s going to help this person make their [00:21:30] own life better. I know that’s really lofty, but.

Brooke Sellas: No.

Ben Rapson: There’s not a lot of things like baking when it comes to a tangible experience that yields a thing that you can be extremely happy with.

Brooke Sellas: And then you get to eat it. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but you touched on a tool that you use that helps you filter through all these conversations, tag them.

Ben Rapson: Mm-hmm.

Social tools and reporting what matters

Brooke Sellas: What are some of the tools of the trade that you use, that you would recommend for people who are trying to become like King Arthur Baking [00:22:00] and, and take these customer moments, these conversations more seriously on social?

Ben Rapson: You know, there’s we’ve gone through a few.

Brooke Sellas: Mm-hmm.

Ben Rapson: And I think rather than you know, evangelizing about any one of them, I will just say that if you run a personal agency, a one person army that manages eight different clients don’t do it all natively.

Don’t do it all on your phone. Get a [00:22:30] dashboard. You know, when I was first starting out, there was Tweet deck. A little bit later there was Hootsuite. You know, a little bit later there was Sprout Social. There’s many of them out there and they’re all very uniquely attuned to what the business needs.

So you know, some of them handle way more than just social, which is why, you know, it’s hard to say exactly what the listeners should pick. ’cause some of them also do email marketing or like an internal owned community, like a little, you know members [00:23:00] only kind of community. And there are tools within each channel to help you report.

But if you can get a management software that brings all that data in, you can slice and dice it in ways that tell you how to do it better next time. And also reporting that can show, you know, if you’re in-house at a company, can show the powers that be, can show the bosses and the holders of the purse, “Hey this is really working.”

“Hey, we’re [00:23:30] twice as big as we were back then.” Or “Hey, this one thing I thought would blow up did blow up.” You know, these are ways of not just tracking right from the beginning, how is this thing going?

But also looking back at the end and saying, we have proof that this is data-driven strategy that works.

This is the only way in which I will admit I’m old. I, I’ve spent 20 years convincing business leaders that [00:24:00] social media is valid and valuable and necessary and not going anywhere.

Brooke Sellas: Mm-hmm.

Ben Rapson: And that’s what folks before me had to do about billboards and the telephone and public relations and what’s the value of getting an article in your paper?

You know, you kind of can put a number on that, but you kind of can’t.

Brooke Sellas: Yeah.

Ben Rapson: It’s word of mouth. And so the only way I think to be increasingly [00:24:30] professional in the world of social media is to get the kind of software that allows you to tell a holistic story to yourself and to the other people in your organization. Not just to manage it well so that you can, you know, sleep at night and be off your phone a couple hours a day.

But also so that you can have that full circle, that cycle of feedback that says because this worked and this didn’t. Next time we’re gonna do this and not that. And [00:25:00] that’s the kind of strategy that every marketer, whether it’s old school or whether it’s the newest and most exciting stuff, sometimes the most intangible stuff.

There’s always a way to test and learn. There’s always a way to keep better track of it, so that you know that your valuable time is going towards the kinds of improvements and increases in growth that really matter to you.

Brooke Sellas: You have to use the tools because we have to be able to quantify what we do, and that’s not [00:25:30] easy. But if you use the right tools, it becomes much more easy to quantify that and be able to tell the story about data show the C-suite like, Hey, it, this, what we are doing is moving the needle, and here’s how. As wrap up, I’m wondering if you can, you were for those people who are watching or listening and they’re like, man, I’ve been listening to Brooke, I love her podcast.

Ben Rapson: Right? That’s like a hundred percent of listeners.

 Ben’s advice to brands starting with digital engagement

Brooke Sellas: I really wanna be like, like King Arthur baking. [00:26:00] I really wanna start to focus on engagement, digital engagement, these conversations. What would your advice be like, how do they get started?

Ben Rapson: You know, we’re lucky at King Arthur because our primary target audience, this is insider information here is millennials. We love that there are bakers of all ages who have been baking for generations, right? We love that. But who are really more and more every [00:26:30] year trying to speak more to is millennials who have learned from someone or are just now learning.

Maybe they’ve got kids, maybe they’ve just got a ton of friends, maybe they’ve got aging parents that they want to bake for whoever it is. And the thing with millennials is that they care about brands that are made of real people. They really want to not just engage with, but purchase with brands who have values, brands who have ethics, [00:27:00] brands who are very true to whatever their particular ethos is.

And you know, that doesn’t just show up in commercials. That doesn’t just show up in grocery store end cap advertising. It shows up. I. In real conversations. I would say whether it is posting with copy that makes you sound like a real person with a personality, whether it is responding to a comment [00:27:30] with colloquialism and dare I say, modern slang. Whether it is you know, having a presence, even if you don’t yet have a strategy on, you know, whatever network you think your ideal customers are on.

Brooke Sellas: Mm-hmm.

Ben Rapson: We’re up to 12 channels now, and next fiscal year it’ll be 14.

Brooke Sellas: Wow.

Ben Rapson: That’s a five person team on 14 different channels. So we [00:28:00] obviously need to prioritize what’s most important, but it also, it matters to the customer that they discover a brand through authentic people driven content, copy, comments. So the fact that you know, they might have seen our logo in the grocery store.

They might have seen our commercial or our popup or our whatever out in the world.

But you know, when they really find us, it’s gonna be [00:28:30] because we made a pun in, you know, somebody’s cookie post. And that’s how they go. Oh wow. King Arthur really is people. And this is a company that I can really kind of invest in and start to value and then become very loyal to. 

I say, whatever you’re promoting, whatever you’re selling, make sure that the people out there know that you’re a real person and that instant recognition [00:29:00] is gonna help everybody involved.

Brooke Sellas: Ben, this has been an incredible conversation.

Ben Rapson: Oh, thank you.

Brooke Sellas: showed us that baking and building a brand online have more in common than we think. I I’m taking away the messy is beautiful. I just wanna say like, as someone who isn’t a baker, because I don’t do math, when you say things like, messy is beautiful, and we don’t use the word amateur. 

Ben Rapson: Oh, we embraced amateur. Yeah.

This 

Brooke Sellas: the content that like makes me [00:29:30] feel seen as someone who maybe wants to try it, but isn’t very good. So I just think the creativity that y’all had, the consistency that y’all had, the connectivity and the love that you have, I think is incredible

. So if you’ve been listening and if you’re hungry for more, Ben, where can people find you online and hang out with you? And where can people find King Arthur? King Arthur Baking?

Ben Rapson: You can find me on Instagram. My [00:30:00] handle is Ben MF, my middle name. Shall not be mentioned here. If you wanna find King Arthur you can find us on Instagram. King Arthur Baking. Facebook King Arthur Baking TikTok, King Arthur Baking Company. I know right. And search for King Arthur on YouTube.

We’ve got a ton of awesome videos to teach you things and make you laugh and, yeah, find us in the grocery store in your baking aisle. [00:30:30] We’ll have that ground and yeah, join us. Come along. Be a baker and you know we’re here for you. You’re welcome in our kitchen.

Brooke Sellas: I love it so much. We will have all of those links. By the way, again, if you are listening and not watching on YouTube, I’m pointing down in the show notes, the, the transcript below the YouTube video. Thank you so much, Ben, for joining us

Ben Rapson: Thank you everybody. Yeah, this is fun.

We’ll you next time. 

Brooke Sellas: Thanks for tuning in to the [00:31:00] Social Media CX podcast. If you loved today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who needs to up their social care game.