Lay's Core Flavours: Improving on the Best

Market Leaders under threat from Private Label.

Lay’s Potato Chips lead in almost every market, boasting dominant market share, premium pricing, and exceptional consumer loyalty. This market strength makes them a prime target for competitors—both local and international—who seek to carve out their niche with more premium, cheaper, or distinctly branded alternatives.

Walkers Crisps: Navigating Competition and Tradition

In the UK, Walkers Crisps, the local counterpart of Lay’s, dominate the potato chip market but face growing competition from supermarket brands offering similar flavours at lower prices. These private labels, now considered “nearly as good as Walkers,” are steadily gaining market share.

Core flavours like Cheese and Onion, Ready Salted, Salt and Vinegar, and Roast Chicken are deeply rooted in UK culture and fiercely loved by consumers.

While modern flavour technology could enhance these classics, any attempt to change them has consistently led to declining sales and consumer backlash, as loyal customers resist alterations to these iconic tastes.

The Key Challenge: Enhancing the Best

Walkers tasked The Marketing Clinic with finding ways to differentiate their brand from private label competitors, justifying their premium pricing without alienating their loyal customers.

The core question: “How can we improve on the best, create a gap between us and our competitors, while retaining consumers who don’t want their favourite product to change?”

The Outcome – Regaining preference and a premium price

By deeply understanding the emotional connection that Walkers Crisps evoke and how these emotions are tied to specific brand attributes, we uncovered a new perspective on how flavours and textures work together to craft this experience.

Leveraging this insight, we identified how Walkers could exploit these emotional connections to differentiate themselves, justify their premium pricing, and futureproof the brand against competitors.

Enhancing the Emotional Journey

We discovered ways to refine the emotional journey of Walkers Crisps to align with modern consumer attitudes, suggesting subtle updates to core flavours that would enhance the consumer experience.

These improvements weren’t just about flavour accuracy—they were about deepening the emotional connection, creating a more satisfying experience that consumers might not even consciously notice, but would feel.

This approach opens a competitive gap that’s difficult for rivals to replicate.

By focusing on the overall consumer experience rather than just the flavours, we ensured that any changes evoke the right emotional response, strengthening Walkers' premium positioning without triggering negative reactions from loyal customers.

Expanding Success to the U.S. Market

Impressed by our results in the UK, Lay’s immediately engaged us to address their core flavours in the U.S.—BBQ and Sour Cream & Onion.

While the competitive landscape differed, the challenge remained the same: “How do we enhance the best flavours to stay ahead of the competition without alienating loyal consumers?”

Once again, we demonstrated that by treating the product attributes as a means to deliver the ideal emotional experience, we could implement subtle yet impactful flavour adjustments.

These changes not only modernized the emotional connection for today’s and tomorrow’s consumers but also solidified Lay’s competitive advantage.

Expanding Our Partnership

We continue to collaborate with Lay’s globally on flavour and communication projects.

Building on this success, we’re now working with PepsiCo beverages in the U.S. Europe and Africa to help them maintain their market-leading positions.

"Other agencies have told us what we need to do, but no one has told us so clearly how we need to do it. This was the most useful debrief I have ever attended."

Lydia Fomuso – R&D Director flavour function PepsiCo - Lay’s Chips

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Chris Lukehurst is a Consumer Psychologist and a Director at The Marketing Clinic:

Providing Clarity on the Psychological relationships between consumers and brands

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