Lays' expanding portfolio of sub-brands — Classic, Kettle Cooked, Sensations, and Dips — had developed largely independently, without a unifying strategic platform that could connect them in consumers' minds. The brand risked diluting its identity through proliferation rather than amplifying it. A coherent, emotionally resonant platform was needed to activate the full portfolio under one brand story.
Vivaldi developed the "Help Yourself to Life (JOY)" brand platform — a unifying strategic concept built around the idea of inviting people to embrace and enjoy the pleasures of everyday life. The platform was designed to sit above all Lays sub-brands, creating a shared emotional thread that could be activated consistently across the full portfolio and all consumer touchpoints.
The "Help Yourself to Life" platform delivered a remarkable commercial result: Lays doubled its volume year-over-year with no increase in media spend. By unifying Classic, Kettle Cooked, Sensations, and Dips under one coherent brand story, the platform generated commercial momentum that outperformed what any individual product investment could have achieved alone.
Lays, the PepsiCo flagship snack brand distributed across more than 200 countries, engaged Vivaldi to unify a portfolio of sub-brands, Classic, Kettle Cooked, Sensations, and Dips, that had developed independently and risked diluting the master brand. Vivaldi developed the “Help Yourself to Life (JOY)” platform, an emotional thread positioned above all sub-brands, and the result was a doubling of Lays’ volume year-over-year with no incremental media spend across the unified portfolio.
Lays is the flagship snack brand of PepsiCo and the world’s best-selling potato chip brand, distributed across more than 200 countries and territories under various local names. In the United States, Lays operates a broad portfolio spanning Classic, Kettle Cooked, Sensations, and Dips — a range that has expanded significantly as snacking occasions and consumer preferences have diversified. As the Lays portfolio grew, the challenge shifted from individual product performance to coherent portfolio activation under a single brand platform.
Vivaldi delivered the “Help Yourself to Life (JOY)” brand platform, a unifying strategic concept built around inviting people to embrace the pleasures of everyday life, designed to sit above all Lays sub-brands and create a shared emotional thread that could be activated consistently across Classic, Kettle Cooked, Sensations, and Dips. The unified activation doubled volume year-over-year with no incremental media spend.
Unifying four sub-brands under one platform meant every dollar of existing media spend reinforced the others rather than competing for separate share of voice. Where Classic, Kettle Cooked, Sensations, and Dips had each been working in isolation, the combined activation produced a cumulative effect that the same budget could never achieve when scattered. The compounding came from coherence rather than from more spend, which is the underlying point of master brand platforms in CPG.
Snack purchases happen quickly at shelf and in impulse moments, where a coherent brand cue cuts through more effectively than four parallel propositions. Sub-brands that developed independently end up cannibalizing each other for attention and shopping-list space, and the master brand loses the equity that should let it command shelf and pricing power. Unifying them creates the recognition signal the category rewards.
The lesson is that media efficiency is largely a brand strategy outcome, not a media planning outcome. Brands that find a unifying platform above their sub-brands compound the returns on existing spend by removing internal fragmentation. Brands that keep their sub-brands operating independently are effectively splitting their voice and paying twice for what should be one conversation with the shopper.