Sweethearts, a 120 year old brand, had a massive perception problem. The heart shaped conversation candies are an iconic Valentine’s gift, but the brand’s image is rooted in nostalgia. And to younger consumers like Gen Z, that image is old-fashioned, outdated, and even irrelevant.

Our brief was to flip Gen Z attitudes towards the brand. To create an idea that transforms Sweethearts from a candy for school kids into a brand with a true place in the modern day cultural conversation.

We took the blurriest, most misprinted Sweethearts on our production line and turned them into an entirely new product: Sweethearts Situationships. Boxes filled only with blurry, hard to read messages, designed to be the perfect commentary on all the unclear feelings in Gen Z's modern day dating.

We sold Sweethearts Situationships online in two drops, both of which sold out in under 2 mins and garnered over 3 billion media impressions - the equivalent of 28 Super Bowl spots.

By taking Sweethearts biggest product flaw: misprinted and blurry candies on the factory line that usually get tossed out and repackaging them as "Sweethearts Situationships" we were able to flip Gen-Z's attitudes to the brand and dominate the cultural conversation around Valentine's Day. Situationships - the term for undefined or blurry relationships was the biggest relationship status for 2024 and by making a candy designed for it, our strategy dove into the modern relationship landscape in a way that felt breakthrough – and true to our Gen Z target audience.

Our campaign launched on 1/4/2024 with the release of a key visual, product launch film, and microsite.

The first drop of Sweethearts Situationships went live for sale on 1/8/2024, with a second dropping on 2/1. Both drops sold out in minutes.

Our hero launch film went organically viral on Meta and TikTok, garnering 1.6M views and nearly 19.3K shares on TikTok alone.

The true scale of this product launch can be seen in the organic PR that Sweethearts Sitauationships earned, with nearly 3.2 billion impressions across more than 3,000 earned media hits.

Our first and second drop of Sweethearts Situationships sold out in less than 4 minutes, and resulted in over 3.2 billion earned impressions across 3,100 international earned media hits, generating more than $67 million in earned media. All on a total production budget of ~$63,000.

From People Magazine, to Good Morning America, to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert – because of our Situationships campaign, for the first time in 120 years, everyone was talking about Sweethearts candies.

Amongst our target audience specifically, we saw a 224% increase in brand interest and a 600% increase in our social following. Across TikTok and Meta, we saw over UGC 7,000 videos, along with countless comments and memes calling out peoples’ own situationships – generating over 5 million views on organic user generated content.