The funnest brand no one's heard of.

In the land of popcorn seasonings, Kernel Season’s is a market leader that can’t be topped. In other lands however, many people don’t know popcorn could even be topped. We found that almost everyone who tries Kernel Season’s buys it again, but how do you get the unseasoned popcorn population to take a bite?

Our task was to create a brand platform that made people realize they can’t have popcorn without Kernel Season’s.

We began our mission with one-on-one internal stakeholder interviews, our brand workshop, and a heavy dose of research. After crunching the numbers/insights, we landed on their positioning: popcorn's mischievous best friend. For centuries, popcorn has played it safe with salt and butter. Kernel Season’s role is to be that movie character with the spunk and spontaneity to take popcorn on a joyride with popcorn’s dad’s sports car. Much to popcorn’s chagrin and or delight.

With the strategy in our brains, it was time to make the popcorn platform.

From Ho-Hum to Woah, Yum!

Sure, popcorn is fine by itself. That is, until you add a shake of Kernel Season’s. Now that popcorn tastes like pickles. Or cookies. Or buffalo wings. That’s the magic of this popcorn dust, it turns anything into interesting. And voila, a platform was born: Just Add Interesting.

Shake Shake Shake

After giving Kernel Season’s a fresh coat of updated branding, we got to creating our launch spots. Our videos followed a simple formula: we enter a mundane scene, an omnipotent hand from above shakes on some Kernel Season’s, and then something unpredictably amazing happens. Thanks to the wizardry of Ben and Dave, (plus the cinematographer from Napoleon Dynamite) we were able to pull this off 93% in camera—making everything feel a little more crafty and quirky.

We then brought the interesting over to social with headlines that playfully introduced the many flavors of Kernel Season’s. Even gave some of them an extra animated shake for good measure.

We Just Added Interesting to real life things in the wild. Like Awesome Con. Crafting a larger-than-life sized Hand, a la our videos, and all kinds of swag, merch and booths. Causing quite a spectacle in a place where everything is already fairly interesting.

And in retail locations like Sam’s Club. But instead of mailing it in with sample volunteers and sad plastic shot glasses of powdered kernels, we added interesting by creating CornAir, an experience around a flight of popcorn that Sam’s Club shoppers could try on the fly.

Don’t worry, faithful case study readers, there’s more interesting to come.