situation:
Sweethearts Candies has been around for over 100 years — they’re a beloved heritage brand whose identity is steeped in nostalgia and inextricably linked to Valentine’s Day. But their cultural relevancy had grown stagnant, and they wanted to connect with a younger audience in a fun way.
brand insight:
Above all else, Sweethearts is a relationships brand. They help people connect and share affection.
cultural insight:
Gen Z have embraced the gray area of relationships by popularizing situationships, a blurry, in-between approach to modern dating that resists labels and categorization.
product insight:
Sweethearts knows that sometimes their candies are printed poorly and turn out almost illegible. Rather than trying to fix it, they’ve embraced it as part of the brand’s character.
idea:
We packaged up all the most imperfect, hardest to read conversation hearts and created limited edition Situationship Boxes, so that people could give a gift as blurry as their relationship.
Press: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Drew Barrymore Show, People Magazine, USA Today, New York Times, Delish, Good Morning America, Food Network, Bon Appetit, Mashed, CBS News
Awards:
Gold Pencil - PR, Brand Voice
Silver Pencil - Creative Effectiveness
Graphite Pencil - PR, B2C
Wood Pencil - PR, Product Launch
Bronze Clio - PR, Brand Development
Gold Andy - Idea
Webby - Best Launch
People organically posting about this campaign racked up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, and the comment section of our launch video was flooded with positive sentiment 🫶🏻
Some of the organic social content we posted throughout the duration of the campaign.
We wanted to get a little messy, so we called out some current celebrity situationships 👀
We also did a brand partnership with Gen Z favorite Ian Charms to create a small collection of What R We? necklaces that were sold online and came in a special edition Sweethearts x Ian Charms box 💌
What kind of VDay present do you buy when you haven’t even defined the relationship? And what says blurry relationships more than reality TV dating shows? We tapped into the Bachelor Nation fandom by partnering with three Bachelor(ette) alums to position our Situationships boxes as the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for that sort-of-special someone.
As a lifelong Law and Order: SVU fan... I was very pleased about this 😎