Are you a fan of Bounty? Well, what if we told you that it was being discontinued?
People of coconut against the people of Nougat: the battle over the Bounty.
“Celebrations” is one of the most popular sweets in the UK. It’s the classic gift from your grandmother or aunty: a box of sweets that includes the all-timers like Mars, Milky-Way and Twix, individually wrapped in bite-size. In November 2022, during the peak of the Christmas shopping season, Mars suddenly announced it would remove Bounty from the famous gift packages, seemingly for financial reasons and low demand for the product. Mars, very knowingly, touched on a seemingly mundane and unimportant issue, yet one that most people in society have an opinion about. Bounty is like coriander: either you love it or you hate it (tbh, we actually love it). With zero PR efforts, only a plain-text statement to the press, Mars just sat there and watched joyfully as the drama unfolded. Culinary columns rushed to provide readers with home-made recipes for Bounty. Some journalists, like Piers Morgan, embarrassingly went as far as to say that Mars “killed Christmas” (he really said that). This PR snowball continued to gain traction and in it's peak, the company actually enlarged its market when it introduced a new gift-package that doesn’t include Bounty, while it kept the classic assortment on the shelf after “acceding to customer pressure”.
Already in the first lecture of every degree in economics, students learn that shortage is the driving force of world economy. So take shortage, dabble it with outrageously silly arguments over our favorite sweets — and POOF! you’ve got a brilliant and super easy PR move.