PepsiCo has added an Extra Flamin’ Hot variant to each of its Doritos, Walkers Max and Wotsits Crunchy ranges, in response to demand for more varied spicy snacks.
Introduced earlier this year, the new products also triggered the renaming of existing Flamin’ Hot variants of Wotsits Giants and Cheetos, to ‘Sweet & Spicy Flamin’ Hot’.
“Shoppers are looking for elevated snacking experiences and intense flavours, so we’re turning up the heat with this launch,” said Doritos senior marketing manager Rob Pothier. The launch coincides with rival brands launching spicy variants and as , 2024 is the Year of Punchy Flavours. “Demand appears to be particularly driven by Gen-Z with increasing demands for Mexican and Korean flavours.”
PepsiCo was also encouraging retailers to merchandise the range together to form a striking purple block in-aisle to disrupt shoppers and drive sales.
This is simple. This is clever. This shows how to manage a portfolio of brands. Good work PepsiCo.
We would describe this as ‘platform innovation’. It is a wonderful thing to consider when you have a range or portfolio of brands in a category, or even in different categories. Platform innovation is where you create a technology or an idea or a flavour or… and roll it out across multiple brands. Where, like PepsiCo, you have a set of distinctive brands in a category, each with distinctive assets, possibly different audiences or occasion etc. it can be unparalleled way to launch multiple innovations for the ‘price’ of one. Each one will land slightly differently with the consumer, and each delivers a different Flamin’ Hot product experience… e.g. Wotsits melt and Doritos crunch. The flavour profiles stretch to match world food trends and it must be setting up future innovation. In this case there is further benefit as it is building a strong cross-brand territory – the purple packs across the different brands are a brave, clever idea. The idea of range blocking the Flamin’ Hot products is clearly great for PepsiCo, but we are pretty sure it will work for retailers as a disruption and focal point at the fixture. This is another example of What Brands Do… in delivering great brand work they usually deliver strong category impact too.
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