Hershey’s iconic candies and snacks are beloved in their US homeland and all over the world. Whether it’s trick or treating,
sitting around the campfire, stocking up for movie night or simply sharing goodness with friends and family, their products are there for all the little moments that make our shared traditions and memories.
That’s powerful stuff – but internally, Hershey felt they weren’t making the most of these strengths. They asked Home to help build deeper connections between employees and consumers’ lives by launching their newly defined purpose: Making More Moments of Goodness.
Did you know The Hershey Company was one of the world’s first social enterprise organisations? From the very start, Milton S. Hershey believed that if you do good, you’ll do well – a belief that’s still a guiding light today. So we knew Hershey’s amazing people would link the idea of making moments of goodness with their CSR work. Our challenge was to create a mindset shift that would put consumers front and centre of everyone’s day to day activities.
To do this, we created a powerful rally cry campaign, encouraging every employee to own every moment to make every product as good as it can be. We then used emotive visuals and language to bring to life all the different types of consumer moments of goodness.
Fittingly, we launched the refreshed purpose during Hershey’s 125th birthday celebrations. A host of activities connected employees with their own consumer moments and the moments they make happen for others. Storytelling was front and centre. Leaders used storytelling booths to share their purpose stories, while employees shared the moments when they fell in love with a Hershey product, creating amazing employee-led content to use downstream.
The launch saw phenomenal energy and buzz. We were just about to unleash a series of quarterly purpose team challenges when COVID hit. Naturally, this led to an immediate pivot for our partners in communications. But, as the pandemic raged, chocolate sales held strong. The team quickly realised that Hershey’s people were rallying against adversity to create new kinds of moments for consumers: their purpose was truer than ever before.
Hershey’s people embodied purpose in action in 2020, coming together around a shared mission to make more moments of goodness when the world desperately needed them. Whether it was the sales teams out in the field getting products safely to customers, manufacturing teams working with new safety rules, or donations of candy to key workers, every single Hershey employee pulled together to meet consumer needs and support their communities.
As Milton S. Hershey once said, “The help the other fellow principle is the only one that will succeed in modern business.” We salute the purpose that continued to deliver that principle through the most challenging of times.
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Hattie Roche
Co-Managing Director and Strategy Chief
Carol Whitworth
Founder / Inspiration & Innovation Director
