Today I’ll be talking about the interesting brand positioning that the “Halls” product has. As someone born and raised in the South American country of Brazil, I was always used to see Halls as candy. Over there, it is marketed, packaged, and sold as candy, seen in newspaper stands, corner stores, pretty much anywhere that sold a variety of candies.
One of the surprises that I had when I arrived here in Canada was that over here Halls is sold and marketed as medicine, as a cough drop or something like that. Of course, as someone who always saw it as candy I scoffed at that and couldn’t possibly imagine how someone could possibly convince people that candy was medicine. But apparently the brand positioning of Halls does just that in North America. When I decide to randomly chew some Halls for the pleasure of it, I sometimes get asked if I have a cold or something, and then I get a confused face when I tell them that no, I was perfectly fine.
I am still not really sure if there is a difference in the composition for Brazilian and Canadian halls, but from the limited results I got from Google, there isn’t any difference unless you consider the special Vitamin-C Halls.
If anything, this is pretty strong evidence that Marketing branding is of great importance for a product. If you can convince countries that candies are cough drops, or vice-versa, that is one fascinating feat.
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