Lesser Evil, More Popcorn …

SHIYU LIN
Marketing in the Age of Digital
3 min readFeb 10, 2024

You can imagine you are doing your weekly grocery shopping at your local supermarket. You are in one of the aisles looking for healthy snacks for your family. You notice that there is an entire section filled with all kinds of popcorn. There is microwave popcorn, popped popcorn, to-be-popped popcorn, freshly popped popcorn, caramel popcorn, cheddar popcorn, low-fat popcorn, buttered popcorn, and butter-free popcorn. But every type of popcorn is high in fat and bad for you.

That’s when a brand of popcorn in a yellow package comes into view, named LESSER EVIL! Would you immediately take it off the shelf and put it in your shopping cart?

My answer is YES.

picture from the “retail voodoo”

I used to be someone who refused snacks. I gained 20 pounds in three months in high school because of snacking. The food “issue” is nothing new to me. It’s a trusted companion from the past, a shadow of the past. But I never thought it would be this serious. Addiction is sneaky.

That’s why I feel overwhelmed when I see Lesser Evil’s website now.

“Lesser Evil”, “Less guilt” is a huge relief for consumers who want to live healthy and control their diets, but are addicted to snacking. The brand name instantly captures consumers on an emotional level.

One click on the lesser evil website and the words “snacks for every age and stage” are prominently displayed. This is very conducive to increasing consumer goodwill, because, for American consumers, there are more large families, a family may contain five or six-year-old children, teenagers, middle-aged people in their 30s and 50s, and even some elders. If a snack brand can cater to everyone in the family, this solves a major problem for consumers in snack shopping.

At the bottom of the main page, you can find a very clear and intuitive navigation bar. Lesser Evil puts different snacks into well-organized categories with a very clean and easy-to-understand design, making it easy for users to find what they’re looking for.

One thing worth mentioning is that while browsing through Lesser Evil’s webpage, I noticed that they have very strong and consistent branding elements in their design.

Different snacks are represented by different animated images, and these cute cartoon designs have a strong visual appeal.

These aesthetically pleasing design elements, high-quality images, and consistent branding graphics throughout all pages help to create a positive impression of the brand and its products.

When clicking to add snacks to the cart, Less Evil’s webpage pops up with a page to enter an email address as well as a phone number, and the page describes how to get the 20% discount.

When browsing the page in general, the page with the email address does not pop up. This ensures the smoothness of browsing and user experience. The acquisition of the email address helps the product to connect with the consumer in the future.

The LesserEvil wellness brand transforms snack time into positive moments by creating delicious, on-trend snacks and other light meals using the simplest, most sustainable, and practical ingredients. And it delivers a positive, consistent brand philosophy at all times during the buying process. Connect with customers while guaranteeing a great buying experience.

This kind of product design and user buying experience will lead the brand to welcome repeat customers one after another.

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