Let’s Twix again - and again
After a decade of inviting chocolate lovers to pick a side with their ‘left vs. right’ campaign, Twix pivoted to a unifying message earlier this year: ‘Two is more than one’.
In the first execution, a lone driver is pursued by an identical car, crashes off road down a hill and lands his car upside down on top of the second car, he takes a bite of Twix before both cars drive away together. Though it aired several months before the movie was released, it looks like an incredibly prescient homage to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. The ASA banned the ad for “encouraging unsafe driving”. I sincerely hope this won’t give the marketing team cold feet about the strategy.
I love the new line. Daft, inarguable, and unhelpful: it’s just perfect.
Silliness is underused in brand strategy, perhaps because it’s hard to pull off. But done well, it can be magic. Think Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’ or the Starburst Berries & Cream ‘Little Lad’. A brand that is playful without trying to convince you it’s funny, and clever without making sure you know it’s clever is a brand that doesn’t need to shout. But first and foremost, it is the very absence of benefit in ‘Two is more than one’ (just like in ‘Left vs Right’ before it) that makes it such a great line. It signals confidence.
For decades, Twix has struggled to articulate its role in the “sweet snacking” category, desperately trying to claim a consumer benefit. Were they about ‘the mix’? (of textures and flavours) or about helping people ‘keep on moving’? Duality was at the heart of some of these earlier ideas such as ‘the good, good feeling’, ‘two for me, none for you’ or ‘the longer lasting snack’. But the brand never really succeeded in translating duality into a benefit. For a while, Twix flirted with the idea of ‘pause’ – with lines like ‘Pause like you mean it’ and the borderline psychedelic ‘Pause more, see more’. The concept even became a branding device with the two chocolate fingers forming the ‘pause’ symbol seen on video players. But alas, a ‘pause’ is a ‘break’ by another name – a space ‘owned’ by KitKat with its long running ‘Have a break’ campaign. And so Twix had to move on, yet again.
Twix found its voice when it stopped trying to persuade and leaned into daft, absurd humour – first with ‘Left vs Right’ and now with ‘Two Is More Than One’. This confirms that the best ads don’t change minds; they occupy them. Twix does not try to convince us the product is superior or even relevant, it simply attaches a brand truth (two bars) to a feeling: silly playfulness. Sometimes the smartest thing a brand can do is say something stupid.