What Chupa Chups and Mentos should do.
The strategy that follows from the assessment: where each brand is strong and exposed, a SWOT in its own category, the concrete changes to make, and the priorities ranked by return. Creator collaboration runs through all of it as the category's highest-return lever.
Where it wins, and where it is exposed
- Audience goodwill is high and brand-safe: negativity runs at one to two percent across both brands.
- The regional accounts already publish Arabic-first, so the localisation foundation is in place.
- Mentos holds a proven, repeatable creator model that lifted engagement roughly thirty-fold.
- Creator collaboration, the category's highest-return lever, is run three times a year at most.
- Reach is bought rather than built: organic engagement-by-views sits below the regional set.
- Owned presence is inconsistent or dormant, so visible purchase intent goes unanswered.
SWOT: Chupa Chups and Mentos
Each brand assessed in its own category, against its direct competitors.
Chupa Chups
Lollipops & sugar candy · against Haribo, Bazooka, Juicy Drop, Borgat, Zello- Global brand recognition and equity well beyond its regional rivals
- High audience goodwill, with negativity near one percent
- Large reach on demand, as promoted posts pull millions of views
- Organic accounts dormant, active in only two of thirteen months
- Single-channel and paid-dependent, building no owned audience
- No creator programme, the category's highest-return activity
- Engagement by views below the regional median, and weak cultural-moment activation
- Reactivate organic and answer the where-to-buy demand already in the comments
- Launch creators in the lollipop and sugar-candy space where Juicy Drop and Bazooka win
- Own the Gulf calendar and the uncontested Kuwait audience
- Bazooka and Juicy Drop set a consistent organic standard and are pulling ahead
- Haribo holds the gummy and sugar-candy share of conversation
- Continued silence cedes share of voice to more active rivals
Mentos
Mints & gum · against Extra, Nova- Above the regional median in maturity, at 2.6 of 4
- A proven creator model that lifted engagement roughly thirty-fold
- Present on all three platforms, all video, and brand-safe
- Very low volume, active in only four of thirteen months
- The creator effort is a three-post pilot, not a programme
- English-heavy for a regional account
- A large YouTube audience, 104M lifetime views, sits idle
- Scale the proven creator model to a monthly cadence
- Reactivate the idle YouTube audience as cheap owned reach
- Claim the gum and mints conversation against an inactive Extra and a small Nova
- Own Ramadan and the uncontested Kuwait market
- Extra and Skittles are Mars-owned, with deeper resources
- Nova is an established Saudi gum incumbent
- Momentum stalls if the creator pilot is not scaled
Do more, stop, modify
The specific behavioural changes for each brand, drawn from the assessment.
Chupa Chups
- Run always-on creator collaborations
- Publish organically again on Instagram
- Reply to purchase-intent comments
- Post in Gulf Arabic around the cultural calendar
- Relying on promoted TikTok as the only presence
- Leaving where-to-buy questions unanswered
- Defaulting to English on a regional account
- Re-brief reporting from reach to engagement quality
- Convert paid budget into creator and community content
Mentos
- Scale creators from three posts to a monthly programme
- Post consistently across all three platforms
- Reactivate the idle YouTube audience
- Treating creators as a one-off pilot
- Long dormant stretches between bursts
- Shift the language balance toward Gulf Arabic
- Rebalance further from paid plays to earned and shared content
The strategic priorities
Ranked by return and urgency, and consistent with the category finding that creator collaboration outperforms the rest while remaining largely untapped.
Stand up an always-on creator programme
Move from three collaborations a year to a planned monthly cadence, briefed on engagement rather than reach. Mentos has already proven the lift; the task is volume and consistency, not proof of concept.
Reactivate the owned accounts and answer demand
Restart organic Instagram on Chupa Chups and reply to the 'where to buy' comments that already lead its conversation. Visible intent is currently meeting no response.
Rebalance from paid plays to earned reach
Shift budget from promoting low-engagement TikTok videos toward creator and community content that compounds, so reach outlives the media spend.
Own the Gulf calendar, and claim Kuwait
Plan against Ramadan, Eid and the National Days, and localise creators by market. Kuwait is an uncontested audience in the category today.
Measure on outcomes, not plays
Re-brief reporting around engagement quality, share of engagement and saves and shares rather than impressions, to align the team with relevance over reach.