The Challenge
Skittles is a key player in the fruit-flavored confections category. Its core offering exists as chewy, lentil-shaped candies that come in a jolt of five intense rainbow flavors. Over its two-decade run, the Taste the Rainbow platform has achieved massive fame for its unapologetically bizarre approach that leaves people thinking “wait, what?!”. The platform was built with flexibility and consistency in mind, always featuring a coupled copy structure. “BLANK the Rainbow” evolves with each brand initiative, changing out the blank to highlight the specific way we are upending convention, while “Taste the Rainbow” is the brand’s enduring call-to-action to invite people to enjoy, share and experience the unexpected. Despite all of Skittles’ success, the fruit-flavored category had become more competitive than ever, with massive innovation in new flavors and formats. While novelty had always been core to the way Skittles showed up, the category itself had become a playground of new products with brands creeping into the kind of Gen Z humor that Skittles had historically owned – making the challenge of getting noticed and chosen more difficult than ever. This only intensified as culture evolved and the brand expanded globally. The boldness and irreverence that had made Skittles famous for so many years faced a new competitive playground – a vast world of evolving media and content that redefined what was needed to cut through. We had to rethink how our platform showed up, or risk losing our “Skittleness” altogether.
The Solution
Skittles built its brand by challenging expectations, shaking things up and disrupting the predictable in the everyday. This kind of surprising twist on reality gives Gen Z across the world – from Chicago to Shanghai – what they need most: to escape the inevitable feeling of being stuck on the Hamster Wheel of Life. To get a break from routine. To feel something different. Find something more exciting. To bend the rules or suspend disbelief. If only for a second. We realized telling this story was no longer enough, we needed to start living it. Turning our rainbow platform from an ad idea into an action that puts us in culture, not around it. Something that could create a more distinctive, pleasantly perplexing brand experience that helps give a momentary release in a life of conformity. The goal? Make people say, “Wait... did that really just happen?” Spoiler: it did. Predictability was our enemy. So, we set out to disrupt it everywhere, giving Gen Z the hit of stimulation they were looking for in the places and ways they least expected it. We showed up in culture not as just another candy brand, but as a full-blown glitch in the system.
