Snickers takes tagline literally, serves Bounty as prank

For a decade, Snickers has been telling people, "You are not you when you're hungry." The brand steps it up with a production prank.

In a recent UK campaign, Snickers took to explaining the ill-effects of hunger with a production prank. Called #SnickersGate, the campaign aims to highlight that even Snickers workers aren't themselves when they are hungry. The core idea of the campaign rested on packing Bounty bars in the outer packaging of Snickers.

Those with the misfortune of finding the wrongly packed candy took to social media to express their grief, leading to #SnickersGate getting viral. This French campaign was created in collaboration with CLM BBDO. It extends the brand's rhetoric of 'You are not you when you're hungry' to 'We are not us when we are hungry'.

Lionel Trapet, Marketing Director, Mars Confectionery, France explained the idea behind the campaign, saying, "For the past ten years, we have signed each campaign with the tagline, "You're not you when you're hungry." We decided to take it to a whole new level by imagining what consequences hunger could have on our own production teams."

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"We deliberately and exceptionally decided to switch our Snickers bars with Bounty bars without changing the packaging. Then we waited for our consumers to react. When everybody thought it was a production mistake, we revealed the hoax," he said, pointing to the video released by Snickers on social media.

Over the years, Snickers has gone big to prove you are not you when you are hungry in India, in sync with the brand's global strategy. May it be television advertisements featuring Sonam Kapoor, Rekha, and MS Dhoni or packaging the chocolates with adjectives scribbled on them. 'Hungry? Grab a Snickers,' they say.