Honey Power

Situation:

Walking down the aisle of a drug store, you could find many brands selling bags of cough drops for next to nothing. These brands often used cheap ingredients, artificial sweeteners and dyes. Most offered an artificial honey flavoring but only a few brands offered real honey in the cough drop, using about 35-55% honey. 53% of those more naturally inclined consumers were looking for something ‘more natural’ in this space.

Approach:

The first step was to analyze the current category to understand what gaps existed in current offerings and where Zarbee’s could come in to disrupt and offer better solutions. Based on the analysis, it was clear, cough drops on the market had drugs, processed sugar, artificial colors, and artificial flavors: yuck! We knew we could offer something better and leverage the key ingredient that made this brand so successful; honey. Once again, we married nature and science by leveraging the honey ingredient which offered real soothing efficacy and added real consumer benefits such as immune support. But we were not done- aside from the product, we knew we’d need a disruptive package to stand out on shelf so that we wouldn’t be lost in the sea of cough drop bags. We worked with a design team and consumer tested the ownable, disruptive hexagon packaging which stood out and tied perfectly to the core honey equity of Zarbees.

Results:

In a matter of months, Zarbee’s went from being an unknown in cough drops to one of the top 5 cough drop brands at a major drug retailer. We were recognized as wholly incremental to the category, so not only were consumers happy but the retail partners were too.