Nutella jar as a one-off piece: Polka dots, stripes, flowers – millions of different designs are available to choose from. Photo: Ferrero

Unique!

“Tim & Maria”, “Darling”, “Marry Me!” – for four years now the fans of this Italian chocolate spread have been able to marvel at the names, statements or messages they themselves selected or make their loved one’s faces beam at the breakfast table. Via a dedicated microsite many personalised Nutella jars were designed and provided with the desired text in the customer’s personal favourite colour on the label.

Seven million jars – one algorithm

Now, however, the days of words are over – to be replaced by art. With this change in mind and a development time of two years the sweets manufacturer has joined forces with HP and advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Italia to launch a new campaign called “Nutella Unica” in its home country. To this end seven million Nutella jars were given special designs – meaning seven million different jars. Each one of them is unique. Dozens of patterns with thousands of colour combinations were calculated by an algorithm – despite this individualisation even the conventional production lines could be used – without any additional investment. Success did not take long to materialise – all the more as the market launch went hand in hand with a big marketing campaign complete with a prize draw. Within a month all the campaign jars were sold out and 10,000 videos were posted by consumers with their favourite jars.

Colourful and unique was also the name of the game for Coca-Cola. 2014 saw two million individual labels being produced for Diet Coke. Photo: The Coca-Cola Company

From Italy to France to Germany

The group now also wants to transfer this successful campaign to other European countries. Only two months after the campaign launch – during which another 2.6 million jars, all of them featuring different decorations, had been produced in France – the colourful patterns have now also been available on German supermarket shelves since January 2018. Here, the agency ‘Zum goldenen Hirschen Hamburg Dammtor’ handles the accompanying media campaign. Each campaign jar contains a raffle code. A winning code gets you a limited-edition Nutella luminaire lid with integrated small LEDs. This up-cycling concept was already used by the group for the French campaign.

Absolut Vodka pioneered individualised design campaigns. The Swedes issue new special edition bottles at regular intervals and all of them are way too beautiful to throw away. Photo: The Absolut Company AB

It’s mine

Prior to Ferrero other brands already capitalised on the fact that unique and personalised packaging design attracts shoppers. Some years ago, Coca-Cola in cooperation with HP ran the design campaign ‘It’s mine’ for Diet Coke in Israel and North America after the very successful names campaign in 2009. For this campaign two million unique labels were produced. To match these, consumers were given gifts such as mobile phone covers or T-shirts featuring the same design as the bottle.

The producer of Vodka Absolut also wanted its fans to feel special: “One of a kind. Millions of expressions” was the slogan they came up with to accompany the launch campaign for ‘Absolut Unique’. This way four million unique bottles were produced with the help of direct printing. Each one of them is too beautiful to be thrown away but perfect for showing off flowers or candles to their best advantage.