Creme of the Crop: Hershey’s 5-Star New Product

What does a 5-Star idea look like? This week’s Innovation Of The Week is one of the top-scoring ideas in our database, a chocolate treat from Hershey’s with a premium twist. Hershey’s Creme Bars are chocolate bars with flavored creme fillings, available both as bars and in bags of individual pieces. They launched last month with two flavors – Affogato, a coffee creme variety, and Salted Caramel.

A major new Hershey’s launch is always big news and a candy brand this big isn’t likely to leave much to chance. The brand recruited pop girl group KATSEYE for a launch campaign stressing the themes of individual expression and trying something new. But what we can report is that the Creme Bars look like as safe a bet as you can get in product innovation – a true 5-Star idea that we predict to perform exceptionally well.

In our Test Your Innovation report Hershey’s Creme Bars score 5.8-Stars, only a point off the maximum rating. The Star Rating reflects the level of positive emotional response the idea received, how many consumers would “buy” (or sell) shares in the product, and the speed at which they make that decision. Emotional pull alone achieved a terrific 60% happiness score vs the US average of 38%. The responses show that while the “yummy” looking product and especially the caramel flavor are driving happiness there’s a lot of positivity simply around the Hershey’s brand – “all-time favorite” says one popular comment. It shows how years of goodwill around a brand’s core offering prepare the ground for new product lines.

Of course new products can’t just coast on their parent brand’s reputation – they have to be appealing in their own right. Hershey’s Creme Bars also perform brilliantly on the “share trading” part of Test Your Innovation, where we reflect predicted market sentiment by asking people if they’d buy shares in the new product. An exceptional 77% would.

The new product is also very Fluent – easy for consumers to understand. We get our Fluency metric by passively measuring the time taken to decide on share buying, which acts as a proxy for how quickly and decisively they ‘get’ the idea. Candy is an area where decision times are high – people grasp new concepts fast – but even so Hershey’s excelled here.

The diagnostic reports show that if there’s one area a minority of the audience is slightly wary about, it’s the texture of the creme – something only trying the product can resolve. But the implicit attributes – levels of rapid association with the new idea – show scores well above the average for “Premium”, “High-Quality” and “Recommended”, predicting that the Creme Bars will find a place as a slightly different and more sophisticated product within the Hershey’s range.