The Brand Challenge

A challenge Happy Pills will face in the longer run would be how to grow sustainably. It is important that Happy Pills will not just be another fad in Singapore, but the brand needs to ensure that it is continuously innovative, distinctive, relevant and likable so as to continue to attract customers.

Specifically, one of the Points of Difference (POD) of Happy Pills is its unconventional packaging. However, there is nothing patentable about its packaging and this is something the brand has to be wary of. It would not be difficult for competitors to implement competitive Points of Parity for their respective brands to negate Happy Pills' current POD and introduce new forms of innovative packaging.

One way for Happy Pills to combat this potential problem is to create "package ownership" in the minds of consumers so that it will forever be viewed as the first-mover that came up with such unique and differentiated packaging.

Another challenge is for Happy Pills to overcome everything related to the medicinal image. A medicinal image that connotes sterile and cold is not desirable for a confectionery brand, even more so for Happy Pills, since it is supposed to be a light-hearted and fun brand that is based on spreading happiness. Since this medicinal association was made by interviewees who have never heard of the brand, Happy Pills would have to invest in building awareness of its brand, so that it is only linked with positive associations as opposed to negative ones.

Trends

Desire for Holistic Health

In the world we live in today, consumers make increasingly proactive choices. People want to be eco-friendly, eat organic and be health conscious. Many people are looking for alternatives and have higher awareness of the importance of total well-being.

They turn to brands thatare more than one dimensional; brands have to provide balance and quality in their lives.

Happy Pills can leverage on this trend by producing sweets with nutritious ingredients that taste good. Furthermore, with a pink medical cross as a symbol, associations of healing and wellness can be linked to the brand. Hence, taste good = feel good = look good.

As people look for moments of joy and pockets of relief in their daily lives, Happy Pills can be a brand that gives customers instant satisfaction, even if its only temporary. Especially with its cheeky outlook on life, Happy Pills can be the ideal “life fuel” people need.

Life Guides

Life today is filled with too much noise from the onset of globalization, increasing internet penetration and the rise of the mobile phones. Information overload has led consumers confused and often frustrated and helpless.

As people look for brands and services for leadership, the challenge for brands is how to provide messages that unify people as well as messages of optimism.

Happy Pills can leverage on this trend using its identity. With a brand mantra of “Happy, Fun, Cure-it-all”, it is essentially the antidote for all of life’s troubles. It is the alternative life guide, the life pilot.

With its confident attitude and the energetic spirit, Happy Pills is a brand that will be easily relatable to not just young customers, but the young at heart.

Active Citizenship

In developed countries, Maslow's lower-order needs are easily fulfilled, and hence, consumers are geared toward the higher-order needs like love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation.

We constantly look for ways to stand out yet we still want to fit in. We create, reinvent and refresh our identities as we strive to assert our individuality but still look from reassurance from others.

In a world of mass production, the challenge for brands is to allow individualism to prevail, yet remain profitable. Brands also need to engage customers in a way that enables them to empower themselves and fulfils their need to own what they do.

Happy Pills can already providesa level of customization for corporate gifts. However, it can be further leveraged by providing customization on its labels, sweets and packaging. It should strive to be a personalized brand for both corporations and consumers.

Happy Pills can embark on co-creation and give customers added value through their involvement. It is important for Happy Pills to have a conversation with its customers, as people don't just buy brands, they join them.

Is there a Strategic Gap?

Strategically, there are ways for Happy Pills to improve. Currently, Happy Pills entrance seems to be filling a space in the confectionary market, where consumers are unaware of their own higher order needs.

Confectionary Trends in Singapore

The positioning of Happy Pills is strategically placed relative to current brands in the market, be it commonly found store-bought candy, or specialty shop confectionary. Coupled with a strong and unique brand identity, Happy Pills will be able to attract a niche group of consumers, who share the same cheeky and fun outlook in life.

Certainly, it is important for the brand to grow and innovate in order to keep up with trends and changes in consumer's tastes. Thus, to ensure that Happy Pills maintains its strong brand, we could explore trends like health, by adding vitamins or using natural ingredients in our sweets. Other areas like festivities could also be an opportunity for us to have custom holiday season gummies which are only available for a limited period. Lastly, we can encourage customers to create their own taglines, and make the more popular ones to become permanent in our selection. Customization can also be a business opportunity for Happy Pills, whereby companies can include their own logos/corporate event logos on the labels and distribute Happy Pills as corporate gifts.

Is there a Tactical Gap?

We now set out to define the brand challenge for Happy Pills' entry into Singapore. We do this by first observing whether there's a tactical gap between their desired identity and the image that's actually held by consumers (later on, we'll go further by seeing if there is a strategic gap between their desired identity, and what they actually ought to be like).

In Assignment 1 we've noted that Happy Pills' target identity is to be a brand known for sharing joy and happiness, customization and personalization, and the act of gift-giving. Tasting nice is, of course, important (and is actually important for any business in which customers put stuff in their mouth), but this is ultimately secondary to the happy, social-focused identity that they want to develop. So do consumers view Happy Pills in this way?

Recall in Assignment 2 that we split up our interviewees and respondents largely on the basis of whether they had actual prior contact with the brand before. In our exploratory studies, of those who had prior contact with the brand (mostly Spaniards in Singapore, they were likely to have visited Happy Pills retail outlets, seen Happy Pills TVCs, and/or received Happy Pills as a gift before) generally tended to associate Happy Pills with it's desired personality traits - they mentioned words like "fun", "different", "original", and "suitable as a gift". In the surveys, those who had prior contact with the brand gave Happy Pills a very good score on "suitable as a gift" (this trait was one of the highest-rated amongst all other traits), further showing the littleness, if any, of the tactical gap.

However, it is worth noting that the brand's score on extroversion and social-ness, while not bad, could be better. So we would say that Happy Pills could be doing slightly better by really focusing more on social exchanges in their marketing communications, but that is a really minor discrepancy. On the whole, they are still okay.

Off-topic, it's also interesting to look at the responses of consumers who lacked prior exposure to the brand. They form a pretty good benchmark for comparison, since anything they say can be largely isolated to product and packaging. This means that the difference between those with and without prior exposure can be largely attributed to marketing communications and their physical retail store touchpoints.

Furthermore, non-exposed interviewees raised many associations about the bottle presented to them looking "girly" (although this may have had to do more with our choice of sweets when filling up the sample bottle). Thankfully, this was not reflected by those who had prior exposure, but Happy Pills might just want to ensure that their product variety is sufficiently diverse, and their selection does not appear gender-biased in any way.

More importantly, many non-exposure interviewees and respondents brought up their opinions that Happy Pills felt "medicinal", and that this was not desirable. This medicinal image could thus be a negative POD. To overcome this challenge Happy Pills has a few options: separate the attribute, leverage equity of another entity, or redefine the relationship.

Separating the attribute would be contradicting the brand’s identity, so this is not a viable option, as Happy Pills would merely be another candy product with no POD. As noted by our good friend, Mr. Keller, “…one of the strongest associations consumers have with a brand is inspired by the look of its packaging.”

Leveraging the equity of another identity is something Happy Pills could consider. Perhaps they could have an actor/actress who plays a doctor in a movie or television show appear in advertisements to build a positive relationship to this medicinal image.

This could work in tandem with the third option for overcoming the problem. Happy Pills could work to redefine the relationship. Happy Pills could attempt to educate Singaporeans regarding the novelty factor of gifting a candy product in medicinal containers to friends and family.

In sum, we would say that aside from the potential problem of the medicinal association being negative when coming to Singapore (which we note is not much of a problem in markets in which Happy Pills is more well-established), the tactical gap between desired brand identity and actual consumer image is not too wide, and is not a big problem for us, as long as we take the necessary precautions already listed out above. We now turn towards the strategic gap so that we can finally draft out the complete brand challenge.