FRUITY PEBBLES CRUNCH’D
senior strategist
CRUNCH’D LAUNCH
Description: On a mission to create a TV spot to launch Pebbles Crunch’d, a new cereal from the Pebbles brand, we ended up creating a Brand Purpose so powerful that clients wanted it to represent the entire Pebbles franchise.
Role: This was our very first project with Post Cereals, let alone the Pebbles brand. My strategy director and I identified that they didn’t have a brand purpose so had to come up with that and whip a brief together in three days to launch it’s new crunchy cereal product. The brand wanted to stand for childhood creativity, so we started there.
I began my insight mining with looking at the culture of kids' creativity. Kids are less creative than ever before. Parents notice this gap and try to compensate by taking matters into their own hands by researching solutions; but when they start to prescribe creativity. The truth: we need to let kids create like kids.
CRUNCH’D is larger and crunchier but with the same color and taste of Fruity Pebbles. I looked at the relationship between crunchiness and creativity and discovered that the human body naturally associates crunchy foods with higher quality (think freshly opened vs stale chips), joy (the food instantly becomes more interesting), and ultimately, creativity!
My director and I found a whitespace that CRUNCH’D can own. The cereal offers a multi-sensory experience that awakens our senses and ultimately sparks awe and wonder to those who eat it. This resulted in our insight that, for kids, “Crunch’d tickles your imagination” and, for the parents, “Every exciting bite sets your child’s creativity free.” This brought us to the purpose we crafted for Crunch’d which was “unleashing kids’ and kids at heart’s (parents) creative energy, one awesome bite at a time.”
All of this brought us to the TV spot where, after a few bites of the cereal, the girl imagines she’s in a rock band. The crunch set her imagination free.
Result: As we walked through the brief with the client, they were so floored with the thinking that they felt it could represent the Pebbles brand at large, not just the new cereal. We uncovered an opportunity to shift them into a new space that shows Pebbles as a catalyst for creativity. For them, this means transitioning from championing creation to encouraging the release of creative energy.
The clients loved it. Even more so, Post Cereal’s CMO was so impressed with our strategic process that he decided to replace Post’s internal brand positioning framework across ALL of their brands with McCann’s Springboard, stating that the process and outcome literally gave him “the gooseys.”
My strategy director and I continued to make brand positionings and purposes for SEVEN cereals in the portfolio (in less than two months, I might add.) If this isn’t a win for strategy, I don’t know what is. As far as the spot, clients were ecstatic and it tracked with client KPIs.
