From reach to relevance.
This review benchmarks ten confectionery brands across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat in the Gulf, using a full-year dataset of public posts and 18,397 consumer comments. The analysis shows a clear gap between reach and relevance. Most brands are spending to appear in front of audiences, but few are earning attention, engagement, or loyalty. Based on the data collected and available public information, creator collaboration outperforms the rest but remains largely untapped.
The ten brands
Two of the ten belong to Perfetti Van Melle, Chupa Chups and Mentos, tagged in blue; the other eight are competitors, each card naming its owning company. Each card shows the Instagram, TikTok and YouTube logos, in full colour when the channel is active and shaded grey when it is inactive over the last 12 months.
Chupa Chups
Present through paid promotion only; the organic accounts are inactive.
Mentos
Active again through creator collaborations, at low volume.
Bazooka
Consistent and organic, but reach leans on giveaways.
Borgat
The most native Gulf audience, lightly activated.
Extra
Inactive across organic social, with 365M YouTube views going unused.
Haribo
Active on Instagram, inactive everywhere else.
Juicy Drop
The strongest organic content in the set, run at low volume.
Nova
Small, but genuinely organic on TikTok.
Skittles
A global account with no Arabic-speaking audience.
Zello
A placeholder account, not an active presence.
What the data shows across the category
The ecosystem-wide picture across all ten brands, grouped by theme.
- Creator collaboration is the category's highest-return lever. A co-authored creator post returns 100 to 2,000 times the engagement of brand-owned content. Juicy Drop earned 119,559 on a single creator post against a median of 17 on its own. The brands that use this lever run two to four posts a year, and three do not use it at all. See the creators →
- Mentos offers the category's working template. Mentos replaced dormant solo posting with creator collaborations in late 2025, lifting engagement from about 60 to 2,000 per post. The model is proven; the volume is three posts.
- Three brands rely on paid promotion for reach. Chupa Chups, Mentos and Extra promote every TikTok video, converting spend into plays at 0.06% to 0.2% engagement. The reach ends when the budget does, and leaves no owned audience behind.
- Giveaways pull plays from prize-seekers. Bazooka's PlayStation and iPhone draws reach millions of plays at 0.02% to 0.06% engagement, attracting prize-seekers rather than category fans.
- Half the category has gone quiet. Chupa Chups and Extra have stopped posting on Instagram, and Haribo and Skittles last published to YouTube in 2019 and 2017. Several brands now hold large audiences they no longer feed.
- Large YouTube audiences sit idle. Extra holds 365M lifetime YouTube views and Mentos 104M, yet both post rarely. The cheapest owned reach in the portfolio is going unused.
- Bazooka and Juicy Drop are the only consistently organic operators. Both hold 1.9% to 2.9% TikTok engagement by views at roughly 2.5 posts a week, the healthiest owned presence in the category.
- The engaged audience is Saudi, and Kuwait is unaddressed. Gulf and Saudi dialect dominates the 18,397 comments analysed. Kuwaiti dialect appears roughly seven times, almost entirely on one brand. Kuwait is an open, uncontested audience.
- Purchase intent is going unanswered. Where to buy is the leading comment theme on Chupa Chups while the account is inactive and not replying. Visible demand is meeting no response.
- Goodwill is high across the category. Comments run overwhelmingly positive or neutral, with negativity at 1% to 2%. The goodwill is already there; the missing pieces are consistency and distribution.
- Almost nothing gets reshared. Saves and shares are near zero across every brand, with TikTok amplification close to 0%. Posts reach their first audience and stop there.
- Static images are the weakest format. Across the category, static images sit at the bottom of the engagement curve. Haribo's image-led Instagram is the clearest drag on performance.
The return is concentrated in one strategy the category barely uses. A planned creator programme, briefed on engagement rather than reach and built for a Gulf audience, would outperform the paid-led approach most brands run today.
What the data shows for Chupa Chups and Mentos
The same lens turned on Perfetti Van Melle's two brands in the set. The full diagnosis, scored and benchmarked, sits in the strategic assessment.
- Chupa Chups ranks ninth of ten on the performance index. It scores 13 of 100, against a field median of 37 and a maturity of 1.4 out of 4, Nascent. Its organic Instagram has not posted since December 2024, and across the year it was active in only two of thirteen months at 0.17 posts a week.
- Chupa Chups is visible almost only through paid TikTok. All nine of its videos in the window ran as ads, returning 0.2% engagement by views against an 18,000-follower account. Remove the promotion and there is close to no organic presence.
- Its headline engagement is bought, not earned. Chupa Chups holds 39.5% of all category engagement, but 96% of its 2,690 comments trace to a single October to November 2025 ad burst, and engagement by views sits below the regional median. The conversation is driven by the ad rather than the product.
- Chupa Chups ran zero creator collaborations in the year. It is absent from the one activity with a proven 100 to 2,000 times return in this category, while a single Juicy Drop creator post earned 119,559.
- Demand on Chupa Chups is going unanswered. Where to buy is the leading comment theme, yet the account made zero replies across the 2,690 comments analysed, and runs Arabic on 44% of posts while activating one of five key cultural moments.
- Mentos ranks fifth, the stronger of the two. It scores 53 of 100, above the field median of 37, at a maturity of 2.6 out of 4, Established, lifted by its late-2025 move to creators.
- Mentos has the proof but not the volume. Creator collaborations lifted engagement from about 60 to 2,000 per post, roughly thirty-fold, yet it ran only three of them and was active in just four of thirteen months at 0.39 posts a week.
- Mentos is sitting on idle owned reach. It holds 104M lifetime YouTube views and 21,800 subscribers, where its quality is strongest at 4.9% engagement by views, but posts there rarely. Its paid TikTok, by contrast, returns 0.06% by views.
- Both brands are brand-safe and well-liked. Negativity is 1% on Chupa Chups and 0% on Mentos, with positive sentiment at 33% and 39%. The goodwill is already there; the gap is presence and creators.
Recommendations for Chupa Chups and Mentos
Every recommendation per brand in one place, led by creators, the category's highest-return lever. The full SWOT, actions and ranked priorities sit in the recommendations.
Chupa Chups
Launch an always-on creator programme in the lollipop and sugar-candy space, starting at one to two collaborations a month. This is the category's highest-return lever, Chupa Chups uses it zero times today, and a single Juicy Drop creator post earned 119,559 against an owned median of 17.
- Reactivate organic Instagram, dormant since December 2024, and rebuild a weekly posting rhythm.
- Reply to the where-to-buy demand that already leads the comments; the account currently answers none of it.
- Shift budget away from promoting every TikTok at 0.2% engagement toward creator and community content that compounds.
- Post in Gulf Arabic and plan against Ramadan, Eid and the National Days; only one of five key moments is used today.
- Re-brief reporting from reach to engagement quality and share of engagement, so the 39.5% bought-engagement headline is read for what it is.
Mentos
Scale the proven creator model from three posts to a monthly programme. It already lifted engagement roughly thirty-fold, from about 60 to 2,000 per post, so the task is volume and consistency, not proof of concept.
- Post consistently across all three platforms; Mentos was active in only four of thirteen months.
- Reactivate the idle YouTube audience, 104M lifetime views and 21,800 subscribers at 4.9% engagement by views, as the cheapest owned reach it has.
- Shift the language balance toward Gulf Arabic, used on roughly a third of posts today.
- Rebalance further from paid TikTok plays at 0.06% by views toward earned and shared content.
- Claim Ramadan and the uncontested Kuwait audience while rivals are inactive.
What this report covers
Every figure draws on public data alone: engagement, views and comments. Reach, impressions and spend sit in each brand's private dashboards, so this report names them where they matter and never estimates them.
Ten brands across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat over twelve months. Each account was collected several times and checked against its true post count.
Instagram posts are credited to the official account, so co-authored creator posts count as the brand's. Audience country is inferred from comment dialect and is directional.
Snapchat sits outside this round: the data connector for it was not in place, so it is not assessed here and can be added in a later pass. The methodology lists every limit.