Hi there. How are you?
Chupa Chups, the lollipop loved the world over has long had a problem. Their wrappers are really bloody difficult to open. As parents we’re often on the receiving end and are left feeling more than a little helpless as we struggle to open these things for our kids.
Last week, the brand and BBH London responded. Rather than apologise and quietly ship a new, easier-to-open wrapper, they announced the hardest-to-open lollipop in history. The Chupa Chups Impossible. This version of the lolly is encased in a carbon composite shell, wrapped in aramid fibres, coated in silicon carbide and dipped in liquid rubber. Per the press release, it is “Blade proof. Flame proof. Quite possibly human proof”
‘The final boss’ of Chupa Chups was sent to influencers including The Hydraulic Press with a challenge to get inside. Buried within this toughest of tough nuts to crack, is a lolly with an all new easier-to-open wrapper - the product we’ve all been waiting for.
BBH’s ECD Felipe Serradourada Guimaraães put it simply: “Doing the complete opposite to what you should do is the obvious answer.” Or, to use a classic BBH maxim: when the world zigs, zag.
The idea: Features, Not Bugs 🐛
This isn’t just a very good piece of work, it kicked off a broader conversation on the IWL whatsapp group: When can a perceived problem or issue be reframed as a net-benefit?
In software development there is a long-running joke: When users report an unexpected issue, and that issue turns out to be useful, then developers may respond “that this is not a bug, it’s a feature.”
We started to think about other great brands who have, knowingly or otherwise, been playing exactly this game. Not covering up their liabilities. Not apologising for their idiosyncrasies, but leaning in so deliberately as to create an asset out of an issue - and in the process, reframing ‘bugs as features’.
#1. Guiness: Good Things Come To Those Who Wait ⏳🍺
Apparently, a properly poured pint of Guinness takes around 119.5 seconds to settle. That’s because nitrogen carbonation is a slower process than the CO2 used in most beers. In a pub, objectively, it’s less convenient than ordering almost anything else apart from those fancy cocktails that Matt is so fond of.
Faced with this in the 1990s, Guinness and AMV BBDO put the wait centre of their advertising. ‘Good things come to those who wait’ remains one of the most well known strategies in British brand history. Genuinely famous in the Paul Feldwick sense of the word and the driving force behind some truly iconic ads, like the Jonathan Glazer directed Surfer above. This tag line reframed an inconvenience into ritual. Perhaps more interestingly, it made the pint something you watched, as well as drank.
#2. Angostura Bitters: the label that is too big for the bottle 🍸
Staying in the alchohol category and per a story we found on wine site Vine Pair: In the mid-19th century, the two brothers who ran Angostura each took responsibility for a different element of the product launch: one handled the bottle, one handled the label. They failed, magnificently, to communicate. The label arrived substantially larger than the bottle, overhanging it on all sides. Rather than reprint or delay, they shrugged and sent it out into the world.
A century and a half later, the oversized label is Angostura’s most recognisable asset. It looks like nothing else behind the bar, but it was never meant to look this way. It was a happy accident and rather than fix it, the right move was simply to never change it.
#3. American Airlines: The Unpainted Fleet ✈️
You might think American Airlines’ famous bare-metal aircraft was a deliberate positioning move and a statement of confidence. The reality is more ordinary, at least so the story goes... Unpainted aluminium is lighter, and at the scale AA operated, the fuel savings were genuinely significant. The original decision was an operational one, driven by engineering economics rather a brand strategy.
But after 75 years of flying a silver fleet, the bare-metal look had become so thoroughly associated with the airline that it was doing serious brand work in its own right. In 2013, they finally painted the planes, in part due to the changing nature of aircraft fuselages.
#4. Marmite: You Either Love It Or Hate It 🍯
Both Matt and Tom were exceptionally fortunate to work for a brilliant strategist called Toby Roberts earlier in our careers. He used to use Marmite as a way of explaining the difference between an insight and a fact to graduate trainees entering the agency. 50% of people disliking Marmite is a fact. Marmite being the UK’s most polarising foodstuff is an insight - a thought that can change the way you approach a problem through creativity.
Somewhere in the late 1990s, someone at Unilever or at DDB made the call to embrace Marmite’s divisiveness. Running advertising that actively acknowledges half your potential audience doesn’t like your product requires a level of confidence that we might describe as brave in today’s business terminology.
What followed was decades of advertising built on this central insight. More interestingly, the campaign tried to amplify apathy for the product. People who had never tried Marmite had opinions about it. The ‘hate it’ camp became almost as valuable as the ‘love it’ camp. The bug here became the propelling force at the heart of Marmite’s ‘brand key’. This gives the brand license to dramatise pet-rescue style scenes as they did in their brilliant Marmite Neglect ad (above) or to lean into political hot-potatos like Brexit.
#5. Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM 👾
This one is different from the others, because the bug isn’t in the product — it’s in the reputation of the company.
By the 1970s and 80s, IBM had become the default choice for corporate technology procurement. Safe and more than a little bit grey. The line ‘nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM’ wasn’t invented by IBM or their agency — it emerged from the market, spoken by the procurement managers and IT directors who chose IBM precisely because it was so safe.
A lesser brand might have fought this, attempting to reposition as innovative, dynamic, forward-thinking. IBM did the opposite. In B2B technology purchasing, where careers genuinely are on the line, ‘safe’ is an extraordinarily powerful promise. The perception of bureaucratic dullness, looked at differently, wasn’t a bad thing at all. It was exactly what the buyer wanted. IBM never wrote the line themselves. They simply declined to fight it and, in doing so, let the market do their brand work for them. We’ve taken to calling this ambient revisionism — the art of allowing a flattering story to take hold without actively authoring it. A quieter form of strategy than the others on this list, but no less deliberate. It’s also a great name for a band.
All roads lead to a 2x2 🧵
Thinking about using this in your next client workshop or brainstorm? There are probably a few things to consider based on our reading around the topic.
The bug has to be real. Manufactured quirks rarely work and the honesty of the underlying product truth or market perception is what gives the strategy its credibility. You can either choose to dramatise a ‘bug’ or embrace it, but you have to commit. Half-hearted or non-commital admission of a liability looks defensive. Chupa Chups works because BBH didn’t just lean into the difficult packaging, they made it five times more difficult and sent it to people with hydraulic presses.
With those observations in mind, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves absent mindedly scribbling out a 2x2 on a post it note. Each quadrant represents a different approach to turning a potential failing into an asset. We've named each quadrant based on the nature of the strategic choice involved.
The examples we used earlier slot in neatly: Guinness and Marmite are authored. Someone made a deliberate decision to dramatise an issue. Angostura chose to embrace something after the fact, refusing to change. IBM didn’t deliberately say they were a safe pair of hands, but they adopted the reputation that they had developed in the market and chose it as a way of building advantage.
Until Next Time 💕
Next time you find yourself writing a brief that begins ‘the challenge is that consumers perceive our brand as X’, it might be worth asking whether X is actually a problem. Or whether a perceived problem might be turned to your advantage. Hopefully, the 2x2 above gives you a way of evaulating the situation and a potential way through if you encounter this issue or opportunity.
As always, our lists of examples are non-exhaustive. We’re sure we’ve missed some brilliant examples, so please share them in the comments if any spring to mind.
Until next time, cheerio.
Tom & Matt x
Love this. Great examples and a good reminder to flip the script!
Love that Angustora Bitters story! Great post today, really interesting thank you