The quest to re-discover what makes Snickers “Snickers”
Over the past 90 years, Snickers has cemented itself as one of the world’s most recognizable brands and most-loved chocolate bars. No matter where you are on the planet, you are almost sure to find a Snickers bar in your nearest supermarket, grocery, or corner store.
However, 15 years ago, Snickers was going through a crisis of branding. The company’s ads, which for decades had been the bedrock of the brand's success, were an ill-defined, shambolic mess, and had lost much of their impact.
Snickers’ infamous “Manly” Superbowl ad from 2007 paints a perfect picture of a once-powerhouse marketing department that had sadly lost its way.
While sort of funny — in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way — the ad ended up getting pulled after receiving a huge number of complaints and received public scorn from the likes of Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD over concerns that the ad would fuel existing mainstream homophobia.
However, worse than that — from a branding point of view, obviously — the ad itself was in no way differentiated or distinctive from advertising for any other chocolate bar or food product. Apart from a couple of seconds of product shots, the ad could have been for any product trying to show off so-called manliness. And what does manliness have to do with Snickers anyway?
This was symptomatic of most Snickers advertising at the time. The year 2007 also served up the short-lived “Snickers Feast” campaign:
In none of these commercials does the viewer immediately think, “Oh, that could only be Snickers!” In other words, by the next day, how many viewers would remember that the ads were for Snickers and not for some other brand?
And as simple as it sounds, this is one of the biggest challenges in marketing. Research from the acclaimed Ehrenberg Bass Institute has shown that after watching 10 ads, only 16% of people can correctly attribute the right brands to each ad. As Mark Ritson noted during his opening address at the 2019 Festival of Marketing, that means that:
“Eighty-four percent of ads are a total fucking waste of time the next day because either people don’t remember or they don’t know it was you behind the ad.”
Ritson goes on to explain:
“The problem we have in advertising is the way we make ads with incredible attention to detail, three months of thinking, intricate focus … it’s in direct opposition to how they are consumed. Partially, briefly, drunkenly, lazily.”
For Snickers, the result of ignoring this simple truth was that, between 2006 and 2009, the brand lost nearly 10% of its global market share — nearly all of it attributable to poorly thought-out, scattershot marketing.
So What Makes Snickers “Snickers”?
In 2010, the team at Snickers set out to rectify where they had gone wrong. Attempting to diagnose the problem, the brand revisited its market research data and, in doing so, uncovered three important insights:
Snickers does in fact relieve people’s hunger — a result that must have been met with a tremendous sigh of relief from all involved!
Most people agreed that hunger changes your personality. In other words, being hungry makes you not yourself.
Over the course of its 90-year history, Snickers had developed a set of incredibly distinctive assets: the logo, the parallelogram that borders the logo, the color brown, and the iconic image of the inside of the chocolate bar.
Putting these three insights together, Snickers now had the perfect platform from which to deliver great advertising campaigns that not only talked to customer truths but would be instantly recognizable around the world as uniquely “Snickers.”
And so, in 2010 it began its now-famous campaign “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.”
Down to the smallest details, everything in these ads screamed “Snickers,” right down to the color of the mud and Betty White’s girlfriend’s brown T-shirt.
Furthermore, Snickers’ marketers made sure that everything they did going forward would be 1,000,000% on brand. And they have never let up.
Importantly, this level of consistency pays off exponentially the more you use it. Repetition breeds familiarity. Subconsciously, we begin to pick up on these brand cues.
Take Snickers’ 2017 Super bowl ad, “Live,” featuring Adam Driver.
By now we can figure out that the Western setting is far from incidental to the brand. It is little more than a bare-faced excuse to plaster the color brown all over our televisions for 30 seconds. And as things start to go wrong, we have an inkling of where this is going. We’ve seen this theme before — from Snickers.
While 2020’s “Fix the World” Superbowl commercial eschews the all-brown color scheme, the messaging is clear from the outset. Playing with the familiar message of “you’re not you when you’re hungry,” the universal sentiment that “the world is not itself right now,” ties in powerfully with Snickers’ overarching brand message — that Snickers makes you, you again.
It is important to note, as well, that the Snickers logo and parallelogram, two key brand assets, appear on screen for twice as long in the 2020 commercial as in 2007.
This all-in approach to branding is perfectly captured in Snickers’ Twitter posts. Ten years on, the brand’s four key brand assets still play a vital role in all of Snickers’ communications.
Logo. Parallelogram. Brown. Inside of Chocolate Bar.
Logo. Parallelogram. Brown. Inside of Chocolate Bar.
source: Twitter
If they couldn’t get all four assets in, they made sure to incorporate at least two or three of them — Logo (playfully changed). Parallelogram. Brown.
source: Twitter
Logo (again, playfully changed), Parallelogram (broken up around the individual letters), Brown.
source: Twitter
Conclusion
By focusing on what makes Snickers “Snickers,” the brand was able to reverse declining sales almost immediately, pulling off one of the great marketing comebacks in history.
Within just two years, global sales had increased by 15% and the brand was growing in 96% of markets around the world. In the US alone, Snickers has doubled its market share since 2012 and now commands more than $100 million dollars in incremental sales compared to its next biggest competitor, Kit Kat.
This success was down to one thing — making the conscious decision to obey the first rule of branding: If people are going to remember my brand, first they must know it is me.
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