This is the only brand that my mum is proud that I’ve worked on!
Now in her early 80s she has consumed the brand every night since she was 8-years old.
Herein lies the heart of the problem for the brand.
They had one of the strongest loyal followings I’ve seen in thirty years, albeit in an aging audience. Recruiting a new audience was vital to protect the brand’s future for the next decade and beyond.
We had to scale it now before it was too late, the jobs in hand were:
1. Attract a younger audience.
2. Dispel the myth that Horlicks is just a bedtime drink to help you get to sleep.
3. Ensure my mother was still excited about the brand and could find it on-shelf.
Our key insight was that the brand was often successfully passed down a generation, from grandmother to mother. Those mothers were run ragged by the daily stresses of life, often juggling the madness of work and family. They needed a brand that could help them escape, just for a moment to take time for themselves.
This led to our ‘take a moment’ creative idea, we wanted the brand to take mothers to a happy place. We moved on from the previous cold pharmaceutical product intrinsic identity to a warm and inviting on. We set a scene with families taking a walk down the imaginary Horlicks steam, killing two birds with one stone.
Moving the brand from just ‘sleep’ to a wider focus on ‘relaxation’ opened the opportunity for future innovation as a much bigger platform for growth. This ‘Scale’ brand programme struck a chord; we recruited a new audience of mums into the brand and delivered strong double-digit growth, clearly stretching the lead on the competition and cementing the brand as the number 1 market leader by some margin.
We always start any client engagement by understanding if it’s a Shift, Scale or Secure business-into-brand challenge. Our initial ‘challenge & context’ engagement session determines just what the brand and design must do to meet the commercial objectives of the business.
With Horlicks it was clear that to scale the brand we had to recruit their next generation of mothers. We then understood those mothers’ biggest challenges in life and created an identity that helped them take a moment to themselves. Simply meeting that emotional need state.
I’d love to hear your Shift, Scale or Secure challenge so please drop me an email or LinkedIn message.