Last week, I had a bit of a head cold and on my way to work, I grabbed a bag of Halls cough drops. Once I started opening the individual drops, I was surprised to find a little message, “Be unstoppable,” on one of the drop wrappers.
As I unwrapped it, I was surprised to see that each cough drop has at least four little messages on them. Some are purely about positive thinking, (“Go for it,” “Don’t waste a precious minute”) while some are a bit cocky (“Inspire envy”, “Elicit a few ‘wows’ today”).
The copy is part of Halls A Pep Talk in Every Drop campaign that began in early 2009 with a series of funny TV commercials. This is the first time I’ve seen the copy on the wrappers and I went through the bag trying to piece together how many messages are on the wrappers and if they’re printing the wrappers on a sheet, how do they repeat?
As far as I can tell, there are about forty little original messages. I went through the entire bag and still couldn’t figure out how the wrappers were repeating. I was actually disappointed when the next bag of Halls I bought just had the logo on their wrappers.
What I like about the pep talks is that they show simplicity on multiple levels. From a writing perspective, simple copy can provide a powerful message. The longest message is seven words. The pep talks also show that a marketing campaign doesn’t have to be extravagant or expensive. It probably took a clever copywriter an afternoon to come up with however many pep talks there are.
More importantly, it shows that marketing doesn’t have to be in your face to reach your audience. I felt better after reading these pep talks (and probably taking the cough drops). And I did go back to buy more Halls, looking for these little messages. My only hope is that Halls keeps this up. I can always use a little pep talk to get me through my day.
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