Let's PLAY and snacks meant for sharing

Let's PLAY is the Color of Vietnam brand for one very specific occasion: several people around one table and nobody in a hurry. The Cheese Ball and Maize Ball jars carry an Ô ăn quan board on the label, and the snack pieces are the game pieces. The rice crackers are made to be snapped in half and handed to the person next to you. Sharing is not a message pinned onto the brand. It is the reason every product in the brand has the shape it has. This piece explains why.

An occasion, not an age group

Many snack brands define themselves by age: for children, for young people. Let's PLAY defines itself by the occasion. After dinner. A weekend afternoon. When guests are in the house. When children and grandparents sit together. The people at the table might be six or seventy, and that does not matter. What matters is that they are sitting together.

A snack for sharing therefore has different requirements from a snack for one:

• A portion for several people, not a single pack eaten once and thrown away.
• A format that stands in the middle of the table, opens easily and closes again if there is some left.
• A flavour most people at the table accept: not too spicy, not too salty, not so unusual that it needs explaining.
• A reason to stay at the table longer.

That last point is where Let's PLAY differs from our other brands. PLAY Nutrition goes with one person on the move. Let's PLAY goes with a table that does not want to get up.

The jar: a small table in the middle of a big one

Cheese Ball and Maize Ball come in jars because a jar stands up, has a wide mouth for several hands at once, and has a lid that screws back on when the game pauses. On the label is the Ô ăn quan board, a traditional Vietnamese game whose rules many people learn as children. The snack pieces are the counters. One jar is one game.

This changes what we ask of the snack itself. A piece has to survive being picked up and put down many times, has to be large enough to count by eye, and has to stay crisp even with the jar open for a whole game. Anyone developing products for Let's PLAY has to think of the piece as a game counter first and a flavour second.

Rice crackers: made to be split

The Let's PLAY rice crackers follow the same idea by a different route. A cracker about two fingers wide snaps in half, and the other half is for handing to someone. The seaweed flavour was chosen because it is familiar to adults and children alike, needs no explanation, and is light enough to eat several pieces without tiring of it.

A rice cracker is a snack you offer the moment the bag opens. It needs no game, because snapping it in half is already a way of sharing. But the bag has a weakness the jar does not, and we describe it in the example below.

Words, colours and the game follow the occasion

Everything on a Let's PLAY pack follows the sharing occasion. The front line is a verb: snap in half, share one half, play a game. The colours are bright and plentiful, because a jar in the middle of a table has to look cheerful from across the room. The game board takes up most of the jar label and does not give way to a large product picture. And the label never states an age. Everyone at the table is the eater.

An example: an afternoon with two products in the middle of the table

One recent afternoon we put a jar of Maize Ball and a bag of rice crackers in the middle of the shared desk, said nothing, and watched while people worked.

The jar was opened within minutes. The lid went to one side, the jar passed around the table, and someone started laying pieces on the board printed on the label even though nobody was playing with them. The bag of crackers sat there longer. When someone finally opened it, the others only took a cracker when offered, because a bag lying flat on a table looks like one person's food rather than the table's food. By the end of the afternoon the jar lid was no longer next to the jar but under a stack of papers.

That afternoon produced no decision, but it produced two questions for the next packaging round: should the cracker bag open out into a tray or stand upright so that it reads as shared food, and is there a way to keep the jar lid attached to the jar so that it does not wander off. Both questions came from watching a real table, not from a meeting about the brand.

If you would like to be the person who thinks about packaging from the point of view of a full table, our Marketing Leader role in Hanoi is open on the Careers page. If you are a distributor or importer who wants to know how to display Let's PLAY jars so that shoppers see the game, contact us through the Contact page or at support@colorvietnam.com.