By: Phil McCluskey
In general, people don’t like change. Once they’ve found something good, they stick with it—because it’s hard to imagine it getting any better. That certainly applies to consumers, but it also can apply to brands.
Hershey’s milk chocolate, for example, is a classic American brand that has changed little over the years. How iconic is it? Well, there aren’t many CPG companies with a town and a theme park named after them. It’s no surprise that the Hershey’s chocolate bar wrapper has remained essentially the same since 1951. Why change what works? Right?
As it turns out, you can improve upon a classic.
The Hershey’s team understood that even the most beloved brands aren’t immune to changing times, and they noticed a recent shift in the marketplace they could no longer ignore. “In the last five to seven years, there’s been more photorealism in chocolate,” said Tracy Malkowski, director of strategic design at The Hershey Company. “It started with premium brands like Godiva, but it’s shifted into the everyday candy space as well. Everyone is trying to reach a level of ‘beautiful food.’”
A recent redesign of another candy brand in The Hershey Company stable, Reese’s, had indicated that focusing on this could offer big benefits. “We had done quite a bit of work on the Reese’s brand, primarily to increase appetite appeal, and the initial results were positive,” stated Malkowski. “So, in the same way, we really wanted to revitalize our namesake brand.”
The redesign would also provide an opportunity to create a more cohesive design system across different sub-brands (such as Hershey’s Almond, Hershey’s Cookies & Creme, etc.) to aid in line navigation. As a first step, the brand conducted some distinctive assets research before the redesign—and wisely included its branding and design agency, Soulsight, in that process. Neither organization was taking anything for granted. “No assumptions were made,” said Malkowski. “There was a lot of rigor in the process before and during the creative brief.“
The research proved extremely helpful to the agency as it considered how to approach the project. “It showed us that some parts of the brand were very meaningful to consumers,” said Rietje Becker, creative director at Soulsight. “The pips [the rectangular, logo-embossed pieces that make up the chocolate bar], for example, were a major asset to the brand. So we thought: what better way to introduce that appetite appeal than through an asset that consumers already recognize?”
As the design process began, Malkowski and her team were understandably cautious when considering how far to go with the new look. “I’ve worked on historical brands my entire career, and I’ve never dealt with consumers who were this attached to a brand,” noted Malkowski.
But the Hershey’s team was open to seeing a range of approaches, and Soulsight wanted to stretch the brand’s comfort zone. “We looked at a wide variety of concepts,” said Becker. “I think it’s always important to push and pull those assets. The question becomes: What do you emphasize, and what do you deprioritize? And at what point does it stop feeling like the Hershey’s chocolate bar consumers know and love?”
The agency presented several options, including images of flowing, melted chocolate, and others that added another primary color to the silver-and-Munsell-maroon palette (the latter is the dominant color and happens to be proprietary to the Hershey brand). Additional variations captured the push-and-pull approach Becker espoused. “There were a couple that were kind of extreme,” Malkowski said with a chuckle.
The ultimate choice for the design included some improvements that helped create the cohesive design system that was a stated goal for the project. For example, the “fins”—those jagged-edged sides to the bar—had distinct colors corresponding to different flavors. “It’s all about consistency,” said Becker. “It was important that consumers could easily find the right product. This color system became a helpful piece of communication to help them.”
The most significant change, though, was adding the chocolate bar itself. The new package design featured a sizable, photorealistic image of the delicious product within—a consistently successful tactic across food and beverage categories—that showcased the texture of the pips consumers loved so much. “Getting a really great representation of the texture was so important,” said Laurel Anderson, design manager at The Hershey Company. “So we spent a lot of time getting that right.”
To make room for those scrumptious rectangular pips, the brand chose to downsize its logo. It also updated the typeface for describing the variety (e.g., “milk chocolate,”) choosing a softer, friendlier font and lowercase letters. “The logo had to get smaller to accommodate the imagery, but that was a trade-off we were willing to make,” Becker explained. “It helped that we were accentuating the chocolate itself, which we already know consumers love.”
When the new design launched, it became clear that sometimes people really do like change, provided it focuses on what matters to them. In a head-to-head test of the old and new designs conducted by Designalytics, consumers vastly preferred the new packaging to the old one—with 72% indicating they’d prefer to purchase the updated version and only 28% sticking with the previous design. Moreover, the chocolate imagery was the most resonant element of the new design, whereas the logo proved the most popular in the prior version.
The sweetest result of the redesign was its impact on the bottom line. During the nine months following the launch, sales increased by 9.1% compared to the same period during the prior year.1 The brand felt that the in-market success was largely attributable to the design. “We do believe that the design—in and of itself—was successful in helping us achieve that goal,” commented Malkowski.
To Anderson, the design’s success stemmed from a sense of appreciation and stewardship that the Hershey’s team and Soulsight shared from the start. “With such an iconic brand, you’re not necessarily there to ‘shake things up.’ You have to start with a healthy respect for your brand and what it represents to consumers.”
Becker concurred. “We weren’t reinventing the brand,” she said. “We were just finding a new way to honor it.”
1Source: IRI multi-outlet, Q2-Q4 2020 vs. year ago.
Philip McCluskey is the editorial director for Designalytics, the leading provider of next-generation design performance data to consumer brands. Prior to joining Designalytics, he was a content writer for the luxury travel industry with a brief stint in philanthropy. He loves to travel, has officiated four weddings, and was once rescued at sea by a retired plumber.
Images courtesy of Hershey.
