How Goodboy helped a leading consumer brand create its best-performing Instagram Reel by identifying a cultural moment and an unexpected product use case.
How Goodboy helped a leading consumer brand create its best-performing Instagram Reel by identifying a cultural moment and an unexpected product use case.
Goodboy is a North American marketing agency that helps consumer brands uncover organic growth opportunities through social listening and cultural relevance. In this case study, we partnered with Instant Pot to identify and activate a timely organic opportunity on Instagram. By monitoring emerging conversations and pairing them with a lesser-known product use case, we created the brand’s best-performing organic Reel to date, driven entirely by relevance rather than promotion.
Instant Pot was looking to uncover organic Instagram opportunities that could drive meaningful engagement without feeling forced or off-brand. Goodboy was engaged to:
The challenge was not execution. It was judgment. Success depended on timing, restraint, and relevance. Key challenges included:
We treated social listening as a discovery tool, not a reporting exercise.
1. Opportunity Identification Through Social Listening: We monitored conversations at the intersection of food, lifestyle, and home, paying close attention to niche behaviors rather than mainstream trends. Through this process, we identified an unexpected but genuine use case: a small group of consumers were using their Instant Pots to germinate seeds for home gardening.
2. Campaign Concept & Cultural Framing: With Earth Day approaching, we recognized an opportunity to enter the broader gardening conversation by highlighting this behavior in a way that felt useful, timely, and non-promotional.
3. Native Reel Execution: Working with Instant Pot’s in-house video creator, we quickly produced an Instagram Reel that demonstrated the germination use case. The content was framed to feel observational rather than branded, allowing the product feature to speak for itself.
4. Real-Time Performance Monitoring: Once live, we monitored engagement closely and adjusted captioning and community interaction to sustain momentum as the post gained traction.
The content worked because it felt discovered, not manufactured. This Reel remains the brand’s best-performing organic Reel to date. Three factors mattered most:
