Lay's Core Flavors: how to improve upon the best...

QUESTION

Walkers briefed The Marketing Clinic to help them find greater differentiation from the Private Label competitors in order to justify their premium price whilst not upsetting their loyal traditional customer base.

“How do we improve upon the best, open up new ground between us and our competitors without losing all those consumers that do not want their favourite product to change?”

BACKGROUND

Lay’s Potato Chips are the leading brand in nearly every market in which they operate. In many markets they dominate market share, commanding a premium price and evoking great consumer loyalty.

Such market dominance means that they are the focus of attack by competitors seeking market share with a more premium, a cheaper or a more tightly focused brand identity...

In the UK Lay’s Crisps are known as Walkers and dominate the mass market Potato Chips. They face strong competition from supermarket own brand crisps with flavours that imitate their core flavours and are cheaper.

These private label crisps had been closing the flavour and quality gap. They were now widely regarded as “nearly as good as Walkers” and were taking a greater market share.

Core flavours such as Cheese and Onion, Ready Salted, Salt and Vinegar and Roast Chicken dominate sales and are the key competitive ground.

These flavours have significant heritage in the UK market and are loved by their consumers. Modern flavour technology could easily qualitatively improve these flavours bringing them closer to the flavours that their names suggest.

 However, any attempts to do this had always damaged sales and evoked a flood of consumer complaints asking why Walkers were changing such an iconic flavour.

CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY    

We like products because we like the way that they make us feel.

Consumers will tell you that they like the flavour or the texture, but what they really mean – if only they knew it – is that they like the way that the flavour, texture and the whole brand experience changes the way they feel.

It is not just about how they feel after consumption, it is the sensorial and emotional journey that the product has taken them on from the start all the way to the end.

APPROACH

Using our unique psychological regression and profiling research techniques, The Marketing Clinic identified the emotional heritage of the Walkers brand. How this combined with the current brand and product experience to evoke a specific emotional journey for their consumers.

We compared the emotional journey of Walkers crisps with the emotional journeys of the competitive and supermarket own brands.

We identified the individual features of the communication, packaging and consumption experience that evoked the differentiating emotional responses for Walkers Crisps.

What was it about the Walkers experience that prompted consumers to feel that these were better than the other products.

As the competitors had closed the ground on Walkers, which parts of the Walkers Signature had they successfully hijacked and how were Walkers still differentiated from the competitors.

OUTPUTS

An Experience Curve and Taste Signature of Walkers with detailed analysis

An Experience Curve and Taste Signature of competitors with detailed analysis and recommendations.

This gave them:

·      A clear insight into subtle but important ways that Walkers could improve both their communication and their taste profile to reopen a psychological gap between themselves and their competitors.

·      How to enhance the consumers’ emotional journey to better fit evolving attitudes whilst maintaining the heritage that is so important to loyalists.

·      Specific sensory updates to their core flavours that made consumers feel even better as they ate them.

THE RESULTS...

These changes improved the consumers’ experience of Walkers Crisps.

They opened the competitive gap with more consumers happy to pay a premium for Walkers, while competitors struggled to understand or copy what we had done.

Lay’s were so pleased with results from The Marketing Clinic’s findings and recommendations that they asked us to study core flavours in their most important market, the US.

We continue to work on Lay’s around the world on flavour and communication projects to help maintain their market leading positions.

 We also work on PepsiCo’s beverages including Pepsi vs Coke in the US and global markets.

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Chris Lukehurst is a Consumer Psychologist and a Director at The Marketing Clinic:

Providing Clarity on the Psychological relationships between consumers and brands