John Cena x Hefty Humor

A shirtless man, john cena, with muscular build holding two black trash bags high above his head in an indoor setting with colorful out-of-focus lights in the background.

Client: Hefty Trash Bags (Reynolds Consumer Products)
Agency: Havas
Role: Community Manager & Social Strategist
Deliverables: Community management strategy, humor-driven brand voice, reactive content & copywriting

Brief

Hefty wanted to evolve community management from neutral, transactional responses into positive, shareable fan moments. By channeling John Cena’s humor, we built a strategy that transformed sentiment and made trash bags unexpectedly fun.


Strategy

  • Inject Cena’s voice: Use his recognizable humor and self-awareness to humanize the brand online

  • Transform sentiment: Flip neutral or dry customer comments into laugh-out-loud exchanges, making people want to come back and comment again

  • Community-first humor: Build a tone of voice rooted in playful banter, memes, and cultural awareness, so replies felt less corporate and more “Cena in character”

  • Drive engagement loops: Reward fans with entertaining interactions that sparked shares and screenshots beyond Hefty’s owned channels


Execution

Humor as Community Management
We re-engineered Hefty’s community management style from transactional (“Thanks for your comment!”) into comedic repartee—every reply an opportunity to surprise and delight.

Cena’s Personality Online
By weaving in Cena’s larger-than-life humor, we made Hefty’s replies feel like him jumping into the conversation himself—playful, self-aware, and unexpected.

Turning Neutral Into Positive
When someone left a neutral or offhand comment (“It’s just a trash bag”), we flipped it with a tongue-in-cheek comeback in Cena’s style—transforming shrug-level remarks into engaged interactions.

Expanding Beyond Replies
We created short reactive copy + social assets that echoed the same humor, reinforcing Hefty as a brand that could laugh at itself while staying culturally relevant.

Reflection

By reframing community management as entertainment, Hefty Humor transformed customer interactions from neutral to engaged and positive. John Cena’s voice gave the brand permission to laugh at itself — and our community laughed with us.