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The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Marketing decision · 2016

Mars let the internet's anger set the price of a Snickers bar.

Clemenger BBDO built Hungerithm, an algorithm that read social media mood and cut Snickers prices at 7-Eleven whenever the internet got angrier.

Mars Australia · Clemenger BBDO

the move

The Australian confectionery category had been shrinking since 2007, and Snickers needed to matter to Millennials who cared more about price than brand storytelling. The agency's idea was to stop narrating the hunger insight and start running it.

Hungerithm monitored the internet's collective anger with a 3,000-word list, assessing about 14,000 social posts a day for slang and sarcasm, and adjusted the Snickers price at 7-Eleven accordingly. The angrier the internet got, the cheaper the chocolate became.

Reactive social content announced price drops, mobile vouchers were saved to phones, and redemption at 7-Eleven completed the loop. The tagline stopped being a claim and became a live, checkable rule about how the product actually behaves.

why it works

  • It made an abstract emotional claim measurable and visible to a price-driven audience
  • Real-time price updates created news, so the campaign earned coverage it did not buy
  • A voucher and 7-Eleven redemption tied digital sentiment to a physical purchase
  • The tagline became the mechanism, so the idea set its own price
the payoffTurn the 'hangry' tagline into a live pricing mechanism, not a sloganclever

what transfers

A line that describes a problem you sell for can be turned into the mechanism that prices itself; making the idea literally operate is more convincing than repeating it.

what came after

Snickers sales rose by 67%, social traffic around the brand lifted roughly 2,000%, and 7-Eleven Snickers sales grew 19.25%. More than 5,000 price changes ran during the campaign, and the work swept effectiveness and data awards, including Effie recognition, before later being retired.

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