Client Profile

awfullychocolate is a Singapore chocolate brand established in 1998. With a brand philosophy of being simple & unique, awfullychocolate sets its vision to bring true chocolate experience. By focusing on producing quality products with no artificial additives, awfullychocolate positions the brand as a premium choice with its signature dark chocolate products. Being an Asian brand with global ambitions, awfullychocolate is preparing to enter the UK market and possibly across Europe and North America.

Mission Overview

The group’s design mission revolves around a retail chocolate product line for awfullychocolate to be sold in the UK market. The products are designed, manufactured and packaged with quality, novelty and simplicity to provide premium chocolate experience that resonates and further strengthens awfullychocolate’s concept.

To better understand the customers's needs and preferences, we conducted a customer research about flavor and consumption preferences with regards to four age groups, namely children, teenagers, working-aged adults and elderly.

After studying the market and customer profile, we arrived at the following conclusion:

1. General Purchasing Pattern

Chocolates are seasonal products. Half of chocolate consumers eat chocolate on special occasions like Easter or Christmas. As a result, manufacturers are increasing launches of seasonal products to capitalize on these occasions.

2. Attitudes Towards Innovation

The UK chocolate consumers are becoming more demanding and expect chocolate producers to venture into innovation. According to Mintel, consumers are willing to try innovative products and new flavor offerings, with 54% chocolate users interested in new formats and 46% in new types or flavors.

3. Chocolate Preferences

According to research group Mintel, almost a quarter of consumers aged 25-34 eat chocolate daily. Plain milk chocolate has remained as the nation’s biggest preference for years, favored by 73% of chocolate lovers in the UK. However, there is also an increase in chocolate connoisseurs, favoring flavored chocolates and dark chocolates. Flavored chocolates have become the second popular chocolate products in the UK, favored by 49% of the chocolate consumers in the country, with fruit, ginger, nuts and caramel being the most popular flavors.

With all of the market and consumers' preference in mind, our team came up with a final product named "awfullychocowich", combining the name awfullychocolate and sandwich.

awfullychocowich is beautifully simple, but hides a secret complexity of flavors that makes it extra special. Made with crunchy graham crust flavored and sandwiched between smooth chocolates, awfullychocowich themes around ‘a daily accompany’ to bring moments of delights to consumers’ everyday life and create a holistic chocolate experience.

To further enrich the chocolate experience’, awfullychocowich is conceptualised under the theme - ‘a daily accompany’. The four flavours, BERRIlicious, NUTtastic, MajesTEA and CARAMELtasy, are associated with different timings in a day based on their characteristics to create a unique and personal connection with each consumer. Each flavour is given a tag line, which incorporates its name and characteristics, to better relate to consumers. This concept allows consumers to associate their daily life with awfullychocowich and enjoy an unforgettable experience with every delightful moment accompanied by awfullychocowich.

To ensure that the tastes combine perfectly, awfullychocowich will be produced with bespoke recipes, with no use of artificial flavourings to uphold awfullychocolate’s image and offer premium chocolate experience to consumers.

To build a unique product image that helps awfullychocowich differentiate itself from strong competitors, the packaging is designed in a vintage style under a consistent theme, infusing old-time packaging with modern elements and loud typography to create a traditional, historic and authentic look. Moreover, to convey the theme of ‘daily accompany’, each flavor is labelled with a representative color, tagline and a clock to display the associated timings. Overall, the packaging is designed in a simple yet sophisticated style; the visual appeal convinces buyers of the quality experience awfullychocowich has to offer.

awfullychocowich will be packaged in three different ways to satisfy different market preferences and thus, allow every chocolate consumer to enjoy an optimal chocolate experience.

(a) Bar and Tablets

Bar and tablet packages target at the primary chocolate consumption market. One bar contains three consecutive awfullychocowich blocks (weight 40 grams) for individual consumption while a tablet is 4x8 in size (weight 320 grams) to enable sharing. The two sizes offer both individual and group choices to ensure that consumers obtain optimal satisfaction.

(b) Collections

Collections target at the secondary chocolate consumption market. A series of awfullychocowich collections are designed for various occasions, each with different sizes and flavor combinations. Besides gift collections for personal occasions, special editions will also be launched during festivals such as Valentine’s Day, Mothers’ Day, and Christmas. As chocolates are seasonal business, these editions, as a measure of promotion, help to generate more profits and more importantly, a stronger brand image as a whole.

(c) Snack packs 

Snack packs target at the tertiary chocolate consumption market-the proportion. The package is small in size (weight 80g), with only 8 bite-size awfullychocowich individually wrapped to enhance portability. More importantly, this allows for portion control, keeping single time intake at optimal level. Each individual wrapper is pasted with a witty quote about chocolate to bring in fun elements, thus enriching the chocolate consuming experience. Moreover, the package is made resealable to further enhance convenience.

As awfullychocolate has limited brand awareness in the UK, to further ensure that supermarkets are willing to undertake the cooperation, marketing strategies are needed to increase brand recognition and sales revenue. The marketing strategy will seek to first create customer awareness of awfullychocowich, develop customer base, and work toward building customer loyalty and referrals.

To ensure greater coverage and impact, universal media targeting at the mass audience will also be adopted. Commercials, in the form of outdoor advertising on billboard, bus shelter, road banner, will be strategically located to ensure visibility. This helps to further enhance brand knowledge and reinforce the product availability to potential consumers. 

The street marketing campaign turns regular benches on busy streets and customers. We will paint street benches into the shape of awfullychocowich with a melting chocolate effect. 

Such interactive and easily accessible installations can effectively draw attention from the mass public and allow customers to recognize our product easily in supermarkets. In fact, street marketing has been proven to be one of the most cost-effective marketing activities amongst other activities such as street sampling.

Another street marketing campaign is to paint illustrations of the fresh ingredients used in awfullychocowich on escalator steps, with the two chocolates painted at the entrance and exit of the escolators and the brand name on the handrails. The design highlights awfullychocowich’s key feature, that is, ‘a simple structure that hides a complexity of flavors’. Such escalator advertisements help to stretch the exposure time and truly influence consumers as they can ignite curiosity and invite customers to discover the concept behind the design. 

The experience was rather unique because it involved the whole process of coming up with a business proposal for a new product, including product design, packaging design, branding and marketing strategies. Because of this, my takeaways from this internship range across a lot of domains.

I learned about the complexities of designing a real world product, especially when it is not internet-based. My teammates and I had to make the 'real' chocolate products using the ingredients that we listed to test its credibility. Moreover, I also handcrafted all the the packaging designs out to test the usability. Although I did not possess many of the technical skills I owned now, I still had fun learning, testing, designing and eventually working with my friends to complete the challenge. 

We went through a round of report submission, a final round of presentation and Q&A. It is definitely a rewarding experience as we became the champion team of the year.