For over a decade, Doritos has launched a new limited-time flavour offering (LTO) every summer. And every year, the competition in the chip aisle gets steeper, with new flavours and innovations coming all the time. Yet Doritos hadn’t been keeping up our target’s high expectations for more exotic, interesting flavours. As a result, our Gen Z target had started seeing Doritos as #basic.

What’s more, “All Dressed” is far from the bold, intense flavours our target normally expects from a new Doritos LTO.

In the face of greater competition than ever, with a flavour few would consider “bold”, we needed to re-capture our target’s attention and increase trial and awareness by +10% for our new LTO, Doritos All Dressed.

Gen Z’s passions include gaming, fashion, and exclusivity — and the spaces they overlap, like customizing gaming avatars.

But Doritos doesn’t follow the crowd. So instead of jumping on the bandwagon of customized characters like any other brand, we found opportunity where no one was looking: non-playable characters (NPCs).

NPCs are gaming’s most overlooked and unappreciated, purposefully designed to fill backgrounds, parrot repetitive story-moving exposition, and generally speaking, be ignored. Culturally, they’ve become a meme, to describe someone without originality or distinctive characteristics.

While the world mocked them, we saw untapped potential.

So, to give them the spotlight for the first time ever, we created a fashion drop exclusively for them: Doritos® All Dressed NPCs.

Our target audience is Gen Z — 18-24 years old, diverse, authentic, digital natives. We call them Hyperlifers — youthful, lean-in individuals living their way, reimagining and recreating culture. Boldness frames their entire world — but to them, being bold is as much about relaxed, quiet confidence as it is being interesting, or overcoming inhibitions.

Doritos All Dressed, the chip that has everything, inspired an idea that brought Gen Z’s “everythings” together: gaming, fashion, and exclusivity.

Fashion and gaming have already overlapped with the advent of avatar customization. And the connection between fashion and exclusivity has always been symbiotic, even moreso with the accelerant of social media.

Knowing that Doritos is the #1 snack for gamers, we saw an opportunity to infiltrate this passion point with fashion and “dress up” the most ignorable part of gaming: non-playable characters (NPCs).

We partnered with skate-couture fashion designer MRKNTN to create the first fashion drop exclusively for NPCs — five looks inspired by Doritos All Dressed. We recreated the collection digitally on five diverse Fortnite NPCs, and built them a custom, fully playable world to live in.

It started with a tease for the Doritos x MRKNTN collab, revealed in an epic two-hour Twitch live event, with streaming partner NickEh30.

All Dressed NPCs then met the real world, through a custom 3D billboard in Yonge and Dundas Square (Toronto’s Times Square). Gen Z explored the collection at DoritosNPCs.ca, with 360º views and breakdowns of every piece. The campaign continued everywhere Gen Z was, with influencers on TikTok and video on Instagram and YouTube.

Fans wanted the collection to be real. Badly. So, in the end, we brought the Doritos x MRKTN digital collection into the physical world. But still, only for NPCs.

Our efforts paid off boldly.

· Sales increased 36%.

· Brand lift studies indicated a strong awareness rate, with over 70% of respondents aware of All Dressed Doritos.

· Our Twitch event chat experienced a 325.9% engagement lift against average benchmark, exceeding the average viewership by 279%, and the average total minutes watched by 619.8% (2023 Media Agency Campaign Tracking Report).

· PR coverage garnered 18.8 million impressions on 178 outlets vs. the goal of 7.4 to 10.3 million (2023 PR Agency Campaign Tracking Report).

Our target engaged with the brand like never before — averaging 30 minutes of playtime, five times the average — earning eyeballs and brand affinity with a target whose time and love is hard to come by.

By combining Gen Z’s favourites with a trademark Doritos twist, the first fashion drop they couldn’t wear became something they couldn’t miss.