Dive Brief:

• Hershey kicks off a new masterbrand campaign this week, entitled "Hello Happy. Hello Hershey's," which unites Hershey's brands and adjusts the company's marketing approach to be more experiential than product-centric.
• Instead of creating awareness with its new campaign, Hershey is "building meaning and relevance," by depicting classic experiences with Hershey products, such as family members making s'mores or chocolate milk together, Melinda Lewis, senior director of the Hershey brand franchise told Ad Age. 
• The new campaign includes new ads that bring all of Hershey's brands together and also a merger of its brands' social media channels into one central Hershey account on Twitter and Facebook.

Dive Insight:

Hershey is taking a different approach from another company that also recently announced a massive "one brand" marketing overhaul — Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola has integrated product experiences into its advertising, but the company is launching ads that are more focused on the products themselves. The strategy follows an industry-wide trend to adapt to consumers' demands for more information about products and ingredients. This, however, is the opposite of Hershey's approach, as the company felt its marketing was already too focused on the individual products rather than the iconic experiences that accompany those products for consumers, Ad Age reported.

Another key difference between Hershey and Coca-Cola's brand overhauls concerns word choice. Coca-Cola veered away from its "Open Happiness" tagline, feeling the word "happiness" was overused in modern culture. Hershey, however, embraces the term.

With two major food and beverage manufacturers completely overhauling their marketing strategies, this could be just the beginning of this "one brand" and "masterbrand" approach for the industry. It makes financial sense by promoting efficiency through a united ad campaign rather than running several campaigns for each brand or product.

The question now is whether these one brand/masterbrand campaigns will be acceptable or confusing to consumers. It's in manufacturers' best interest for consumers to know which companies make key products. Manufacturers run the risk of losing individual brand identities — particularly true of a move like creating a master social media account.