Polo hopes to make a mint with radio revamp

If KitKat dumping its 47-year-old slogan was not shocking enough, here comes the next news flash involving one of the nation's favourite sweets - the recipe for Polo, the mint with the hole, is changing.
The iconic Polo mint is altering its ingredients to give the sweet a mintier flavour, and will be selling the changes to consumers with a new radio advertising campaign.
The brand's owner, Nestle Rowntree, is remaining coy about whether the flavour change was the most radical in the 56-year-old brand's history.
Last week the company dumped the KitKat slogan "have a break, have a KitKat" after five decades in favour of "make the most of your break".
In another bold move, the sweet that sold itself into the nation's affections by advertising itself as "the mint with the hole" has abandoned visual media for the first time.
It is telling consumers about the new mintier flavour solely by using radio in a £400,000 campaign by the advertising agency, J Walter Thompson.
Polo had taken a different path than rivals which claim to have a super-strong flavour or to be able to clean people's teeth, said Will Browne-Swinburne, an account director at J Walter Thompson.
"It's a considered reaction from a great brand to the way the world is going," Mr Browne-Swinburne said.
"In a world getting more extreme, Polo has made a token gesture," he said.
Nestle Rowntree said it could sell the changes using radio alone because the brand was iconic enough to be able to dispense with the visual media.
The six radio advertisements say that Polo mints have become 13.063% mintier.
"We've updated Polo in line with consumer trends and palates, and we wanted to tell the story the way Polo would. We felt that radio was the best medium to do this," said Mike O'Reilly, the head of consumer communications at Nestle.
Polo and J Walter Thompson will hope that the recipe change does not invite comparisons with Coca-Cola's disastrous decision in the 1980s to alter the flavour of its classic Coke.
After unprecedented consumer anger and lost sales, Coke had to revert to its original recipe.
Polo has always previously relied on visual advertising. At one time the brand even ran poems on train posters proclaiming its mints in parodies of poets such as Shakespeare.
Last month Nestle Rowntree lost an appeal case to expand its Polo trademark to include the familiar shape of the mint in any size or colour and without the word Polo embossed on it.
Lord Justice Mummery threw out a complex application in the appeal court and said: "This is an appeal concerning Polos, the mint with the hole in the middle. This is an appeal with a hole in the middle. It is dismissed."
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Stephen Brook, advertising correspondent
MediaGuardian, Tuesday 10 August 2004 07.25 BST