Guac damn!

How a challenger brand can use prediction-breaking creativity to inject energy into a stagnant category, stand apart on shelf, and drive meaningful business growth.

Context

We’ve loved collaborating with Holy Moly to carve out a distinctive space in the supermarket dip aisle – a category long dominated by own-label products. While competitors relied on rational, ingredient-led messaging, Holy Moly saw an opportunity to play a different game: moving the conversation from functional benefits to emotional connection. Our work demonstrates how a challenger brand can use prediction-breaking creativity to inject energy into a stagnant category, stand apart on shelf, and drive meaningful business growth.

Hook: Category vs. Consumers

The dip category presents a hidden challenge for brands. Supermarket shelves are crowded with own-label offerings, creating a sea of sameness where generic claims and tired "homemade" cues dominate. As consumers default to price and convenience over brand preference, building long-term brand equity becomes increasingly difficult. To win, we needed to disrupt habitual decision-making and challenge the "good enough" mindset.

At the same time, the category suffers from a personality problem. While category marketing is largely bland, functional, and overly serious, the people buying these products are anything but. Food lovers want to delight their guests, elevate everyday occasions, and share food that sparks conversation. The gap between a dull category and an expressive audience created a clear opportunity.

Twist: From Product Benefits to Emotional Connection

That disconnect became our springboard. Continuing to compete on taste and ingredients alone wasn't going to create meaningful differentiation, so we stopped behaving like a product brand and started thinking about how we wanted people to feel.

The answer was hiding in plain sight. We transformed the Holy Moly brand name into a literal expression of delight – bringing it to life through a distinctive, cheeky sticker device that captured the spontaneous reaction people have when they discover something unexpectedly good.

Magic: From Ingredient-Led to Exclamation-Led

With no other brand owning "fun" in the category, we leaned hard into Holy Moly's bold, upbeat and irreverent personality. Rather than competing on product claims, we transformed the brand into an expression of delight – using creativity to outshout our media spend and build distinctive memory structures.

We brought this positioning to life through a series of standout campaigns, each reinforcing the same core idea while keeping the brand fresh, culturally relevant and impossible to ignore.

The ‘Guac Damn’ Campaign:

We launched Holy Moly with a bold, brand-building OOH campaign that transformed the product into a spontaneous expression of delight. Breaking away from the category's predictable food photography and functional messaging, the tongue-in-cheek creative captured the genuine reaction people have when they discover something unexpectedly good.

To extend the idea into social, we added an unexpected twist: monks and nuns were captured admiring the billboards, creating a playful visual link to the "Holy" in Holy Moly and generating additional engagement beyond paid media.

The Avocado Lottery: Every avocado lover knows the frustration of the "avocado lottery" – the endless gamble between rock-hard and overripe.

Building on our positioning that guacamole is the new hummus, we turned this universal pain point into a prediction-breaking campaign. Animated digital billboards featured a Holy Moly-themed fruit machine, positioning the brand as the guaranteed alternative to avocado disappointment. The idea was then brought into the real world through a jackpot-style activation, turning a familiar frustration into a memorable brand experience.

Valentine’s Day Karaoke: Valentine's Day is one of the most crowded moments in the social calendar, so we took a deliberately unexpected approach.

We reworked some of the cheesiest love songs ever written – from Lady in Red to Let's Get It On – rewriting the lyrics to celebrate Holy Moly's cheese dip range. Released as karaoke-style social content, the campaign invited audiences to sing along, creating a playful and highly shareable alternative to the category's usual Valentine's clichés.

New Product Launches: To support the launch of Guac-to-go-le and the new nacho kits, we created a series of social-first films designed to stop thumbs and spark conversation.

Targeting food lovers across Instagram and TikTok, the creative embraced the brand's surreal sense of humour, featuring everything from a unicyclist to a full Mariachi band. The result was launch content that felt unmistakably Holy Moly – entertaining first, product-focused second, and highly effective at driving engagement.

Creativity with Impact: The Commercial Result

By rejecting category conventions and consistently investing in a distinctive, ownable brand personality, Holy Moly built meaningful differentiation in a category where most products are interchangeable.

The cumulative effect was stronger brand equity, increased mental availability, and significant share gains against supermarket own-label competitors. Most importantly, creativity translated into commercial performance:

42% compound annual sales growth over the past three years, compared with just 3% growth across own-label dips.