Mike Cassell, Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at Another Thing, and Kate Adams, VP of Marketing at Mike’s Hot Honey, didn’t set out to create vocabulary. They set out to capture something already happening—the euphoric, full-body serotonin spike people get when they drizzle hot honey on unexpected foods.
Seven months after launching “Drizzle the Mikes” in July, menu penetration of sweet and spicy items is up 38% in the last year. Hot honey is projected to outpace nearly all culinary flavors by 2027. The word “spicy”—that sweet-heat combination—has entered cultural vocabulary.
This Richmond-Boston indie agency proved that culture-shaping work doesn’t require Super Bowl budgets. It requires alignment between strategic agencies and brand leaders who greenlight bold work based on what’s already true.
How people were already talking about the product
Another Thing starts with a question: how are people talking about the product? Not how should they talk about it, or how can we make them talk about it. How are they already talking?
“We like to fuel a conversation with a brand and make a brand part of that conversation, versus trying to start one from out of nowhere,” Cassell explains. For Mike’s Hot Honey, that meant diving into social media to understand the fan experience.
What they found: people couldn’t stop putting it on unexpected things. Pizza led to tuna salad. Tuna salad led to crackers. Crackers led to peanut butter sandwiches. Then dessert. The insight wasn’t manufactured—it was already happening. People were discovering flavor combinations they’d never considered before.
The tweet that sparked everything
One tweet changed the trajectory: “I can’t stop eating Mike’s Hot Honey on stuff.”
The team started watching TikToks of people putting hot honey on increasingly strange combinations. “How did Mike’s Hot Honey end up on my tuna salad?” someone asked. That’s a weird combination. Pizza to tuna salad to crackers to peanut butter sandwiches to dessert.
The pattern was clear: people couldn’t stop discovering new uses for it. The euphoria was real, and it was already being described by fans. Adams had given them a brief asking to “capture that euphoric feeling.” The agency’s job was finding the best way to articulate what was already true.
What major CPG brands miss about proximity
Adams came from Mars, working on Skittles, Snickers, and Five Gum—beloved brands with massive budgets and multiple agency partners. What made Mike’s Hot Honey different wasn’t just the product. It was the proximity to people who love it.
“As brands scale, as agencies scale, you become steps further away from the consumer,” she explains. “My biggest learning was maintain that proximity to the people who know your brand, consume your brand. Don’t just refer to them as consumers—they’re the people at the core of it.”
Mike’s Hot Honey had 15 years of grassroots foundation. Chefs at small restaurants. Pizzeria owners. Home cooks discovering it and telling friends. There was built-in passion without national awareness yet. The campaign could embody those real people—the first adopters who took risks early on—rather than inventing brand characters from scratch.
The warning signs of manufactured relevance
Most brands have marketing plans, not cultural movements. Cassell has learned to spot the difference early. “If a brand is trying to force something into culture that doesn’t have roots there, it feels inauthentic from the jump,” he says.
The warning signs: brands that want to be part of a conversation but haven’t done the groundwork. Clients who see a trend and want to capitalize without understanding the why behind it. Marketing that starts with “how do we make this go viral?” instead of “what’s already resonating?”
“You can’t manufacture what Mike’s Hot Honey had,” Cassell notes. “But you can listen to what’s already there and amplify it in a way that feels true to how people actually experience your product.”
When traditional pizza places validate your work
Cassell is from New Haven, Connecticut, where pizza is religion. Pepe’s Pizzeria—one of the godfathers of New Haven-style pizza—doesn’t mess around with what they do. Five years ago, asking for hot honey on pizza there would get you dismissed.
Then Pepe’s launched a campaign putting Mike’s Hot Honey on pizza. Friends from New Haven reached out to Cassell asking if he had anything to do with it. That moment marked the shift from trend to authentic ingredient. “Any ingredient would have to feel authentic for them to put it on,” he says. “The fact that they put Mike’s on it—that’s definitely gone from ‘this is cool’ to ‘this is an authentic way to make pizza.'”
Adams frames it differently: it’s not about jumping on trends versus being authentic. It’s about when restaurants are ready to embark on sweet heat, when their patrons are ready for it, when it makes sense for their menu evolution. “We have not found a food pairing that isn’t elevated by the flavor of sweet and heat,” she says.
The campaign even included Easter eggs nodding to the community that’s been there from the start—the first spot takes place in a pizzeria because that’s where Mike’s began, the board meeting spot happens in a diner because the first board meeting actually happened in one.
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Another Thing
Mike Cassell LinkedIn
Another Thing LinkedIn
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Mike’s Hot Honey
Kate Adams LinkedIn
Mike’s Hot Honey LinkedIn
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