Maynards Sweet Hits
This wasn’t one big thing. IT was A lot of small, “Deliciously odd” things that helped build the Maynards masterbrand.
The challenge from Cadbury, was to build some equity into the Maynards brand. Candy lovers were well aware of the sweet and sour gummies that the brand offered, but it lacked a personality and the sub brands didn’t feel connected in a meaningful way. Without a strong tonal DNA, Swedish Berries, WIne Gumes, Cherry Blasters, etc. were just additional candy options on shelf.
The crown would become the center of The brand’s personality and POV.
Given that the brand felt like a group of misfit candies, we settled on a brand tone that we described as “deliciously odd.” The Maynard crown was our key in bringing it all to life. We decided to give the crown a function. It would figuratively and literally shine a spotlight on things, people, behaviours, and candies that were “deliciously odd.” Crown ______” became the blueprint for all creative executions and “Crown Your Mouth” became the brand’s sign off and tagline
For this to ladder up to anything for an audience, we needed to crown a lot of things, rather than creating one or two anthemic pieces.
We called our content strategy “Sweet Hits.” The first was built to support Maynards Wine Gums - the sort of boring, older sibling in the Maynards family. We travelled far far away from any known city to rural wine country and, with the help of a certified ‘Chewmelier,’ we turned some wine aficionados into candy connoisseurs.
crown your mouth helped us dust off some older Maynards brands and also had the flexibility to help launch new ones.
Maynards had just tested a few new flavours with focus groups and green apple came out as the fave. We were given creative freedom to build this new candy’s brand from the ground up. For a candy no one had ever tasted, we thought we’d give it an unforgettable personality that no one or no mouth would forget meeting for the first time. The flavour of the candy became the tone of the candy were wrapped into one hilariously grouchy senior, Sour Granny Smith.
Posters and transit shelters around convenience and grocery introduced people to Granny.
We also turned Sour Granny Smith into a meme and plastered her all of the city. Ironically, the execution caught the eye of one of my future employers, BuzzFeed, and was included in a post called, “The Best Street Ads Of The Year, So Far.”
And our lives, or this sweet hit, wouldn’t have been complete without sticking the real Sour Granny Smith in a real vending machine to punk some kids.
For the holiday season, we built a digital wall of fishmas gifts for your friends and family.
The Swedish Fish wall was a collection of 100 talking gummies, each with a unique holiday greeting that people could share with family and friends online.
Every fish on the wall turned to its audience and delivered a quirky holiday message in a fishy, Swedish accent. Sharing was done with a couple clicks/taps.
Above is the fraction of the site visitors would see on their devices. Below is the complete 100 fish wall. The site was designed for exploration. To help with that, a small nav followed the user around to help them track which fish they had already engaged with.
Here’s a video of the experience. Don’t worry, it doesn’t go through all 100 fish.
Crown Your Mouth was also built to give Maynards the opportunity to inject themselves into pop culture in places they hadn’t before.
When the Olympics came around, we created some life-sized Maynards candies and had them participate in some popular Olympic events. During each event, we let things go horribly wrong, at the hands of a giant mouth… that actually had no hands… cause mouths don’t have hands… just feet… question mark?
