A colleague of mine offered me Hide and Seek biscuits today during lunch break.
Hide and Seek is a commercial mimicry of the infamous chocolate chip cookie.
At first glance, the plastic wrapper of Hide and Seek is no different from all other biscuit brands I have seen. The wrapper designer has used multiple fonts on the same side, which is a style frowned upon by experienced designers.
I love the velvety violet color though.
While I was nibbling on the free biscuits, tiny chocolate granules dissolving on my tongue, I fidgeted with the wrapper to look at the name of the manufacturer.
On careful look, the manufacturer turned out to be Parle Biscuits Pvt. Ltd., a company better known for its more popular biscuit Parle-G. This was when I also noticed that the wrapper had text in multiple languages. One is obviously English, and the other are Portuguese, French, Arabic, and Tamil (if my best judgment is credible enough).
This fascinated me.
Narrating my thought process step-by-step will probably bore you. Thus, here is a list of insights I got from the plastic wrapper about operating a business that has its consumers across multiple nations.
1) People don’t buy products. They buy feelings. In this aspect, Hide and Seek stands out.
In the real world, people do judge a book by its cover. This is why the velvety violet wrapper instantly communicates the brand’s maturity.
The wrapper has a picture of a partially-bit chocolate bar. Just below this, the wrapper features biscuit pieces splashing into liquid chocolate. Any sentence that has the word “Chocolate” is italicized, almost as if to highlight the product’s aesthetics.
All in all, the wrapper screams that the product is worth the price you pay.
Compare this with the plastic wrappers that come from a company that does not care about design and brand perception. You may as well use solid colors without a gradient, have improper package finishing, or color combinations that do not match.
The first impression says it all. People do not buy a product. They buy feelings. And consuming biscuits from a wrapper that shines certainly wins eating one from transparent plastic, that says “cheap” on the label even if it does not.
2) Hide and Seek wants intimacy with its end-user. People buy products they relate to.
Hide and Seek certainly does not want to stay limited with the English language.
For most people of the world, English is a second language. The English language does not bring good feelings inside the hearts of most of these people. Rather, it may remind one of the failed English exams or the embarrassing speech they gave in high school.
It does not take an instruction manual to understand that the plastic wrapper encloses 82.5 grams of delicious biscuits with chocolate toppings. By using multiple languages on the wrapper, the company has instead tried to create a sense of familiarity among people across nations.
When a foreign company exports products to a country that has local language engraved on the wrapper, the chocolate chip cookie munchkins of that country can’t help but feel included.
3) Hide and Seek sounds familiar. People buy familiar.
Hide and Seek. If you feel like you have heard of this phrase before, you have.
Multinational companies may fail to establish a strong footing in a foreign country. They might focus on marketing and sales tactics that worked in the previous country without properly absorbing the different styles and attitudes of a new country.
In this case, the company decided to use the name that resonates with its end-user. Children all across the world have played Hide and Seek, despite differences in language, culture, and ideologies.
The game Hide and Seek is thrilling, filled with suspense. It just is something fun. For adults, the memory of the game brings nostalgia.
By choosing this name, the company has already forced its product to be a part of you. The company cleverly engineered the name to make you feel as if you have close ties with the product.
People hang out with familiar people. People gossip about familiar topics. And people buy familiar things.
