The Secret to chocolate success

Right. So there was this chocolate bar called Secret.

Bird’s nest chocolate coating. Mousse centre pinched from a Walnut Whip. Disappeared sometime around when Britpop was a thing.

I miss it. I want one.

Secret was confectionery committee work. The sort of chocolate bar that happened when someone said “What if we made something a bit like that other thing, but different enough to avoid copyright issues?”

Yet here we are, twenty-odd years later, and there’s a Facebook group with 2,500 members demanding its return. Two and a half thousand people pining for knockoff Walnut Whip filling wrapped in novelty chocolate.

Which tells us everything we need to know about how marketing actually works versus how we pretend it works.

The filing error that became a feature

The human brain operates like an overenthusiastic librarian with no proper cataloguing system. Memories get filed under the most peculiar categories. “Things I ate aged nine” apparently carries the same emotional weight as “Profound life experiences” and “Songs that make me cry.”

Secret wasn’t trying to be memorable. It was just reliably there, being derivative. The chocolate bar equivalent of wallpaper. Present but unremarkable.

Until it wasn’t present at all.

Then something fascinating happened. Absence transformed adequacy into legend. Scarcity created significance where none had existed. The forgettable became unforgettable precisely because we could no longer forget about it.

This isn’t unique to chocolate bars. It’s how memory works. And memory, as it turns out, is rather more important than whatever the hell we’re calling “customer experience optimization” this quarter.

The accidental immortals

Consider Ceefax. Blocky text on primary colours. Loading times measured in geological epochs. The user experience of watching paint dry, if paint took thirty seconds to appear one letter at a time.

Nobody mourned its passing in 2012. Until they did. Now there are entire Twitter accounts dedicated to Ceefax nostalgia. People wax lyrical about teletext holidays and football scores that took actual patience to access.

Or take Woolworths. An entire business based on pick ‘n’ mix. Yet the closure of the last shop in 2009 was treated like a state funeral.

Suddenly everyone remembered shopping there as children, conveniently forgetting they’d been using Amazon for years.

These brands achieved something every marketing director claims they want: genuine emotional connection. Not through “brand storytelling” (Christ, that phrase) or customer journey mapping or whatever other consultant-spawned nonsense is trending on LinkedIn. Through the simple act of existing during someone’s formative years, then having the decency to disappear before reality set in.

The formative years theory

There’s a critical window in human development. Roughly ages eight to sixteen. During this period, brand preferences embed themselves like emotional shrapnel. The choices made then echo for decades.

Secret bars weren’t “targeting the youth demographic” (and isn’t that just peak corporate nonsense). They were simply there, being aggressively average, while children were busy becoming people. The brand became part of the background noise of growing up. Filed away with other important eight-year-old concerns like whether your mum would buy the good crisps.

This explains why seemingly rational people spend actual money on “retro” versions of confectionery that were, by any objective measure, substandard.

The brain doesn’t file these memories under “mediocre chocolate products.” It files them under “being young” and “simpler times” and “before I had to worry about mortgages.”

Powerful categories, those. More powerful than any persona workshop ever produced.

The modern marketing paradox

We live in the age of data-driven everything. Customer personas that read like dating profiles written by sociopaths. Journey mapping that assumes humans behave like well-programmed robots. Attribution models that claim to measure the unmeasurable. Conversion funnels that funnel nothing except budget into the pockets of analytics vendors.

We’ve turned marketing into performance theater. Complete with PowerPoint hypotheses and measurement frameworks that measure everything except what actually matters.

Yet some of the most powerful brand connections happen by accident. Through serendipity rather than strategy. Through simply being present during the right moments, not through “perfectly optimized touchpoints” (there’s another phrase that needs a good kicking).

The brands we remember aren’t always the ones that tried hardest to be memorable. They’re often the ones that were just there, doing their thing, while life was happening around them.

This creates an uncomfortable truth for modern marketers: You cannot strategy your way into someone’s heart. You cannot optimize your way into genuine affection. You cannot A/B test your way to emotional significance.

But admitting that would require acknowledging that most of what we do is educated guesswork dressed up in expensive consulting frameworks.

The reliability paradox

Secret bars succeeded not despite being unremarkable, but because of it. Reliability, even mediocre reliability, creates a different kind of trust than brilliance does.

Brilliant campaigns get remembered for being brilliant. Reliable products get remembered for being there. And “being there” turns out to be rather more emotionally significant than whatever virality-chasing nonsense is clogging up your content calendar.

This isn’t an argument for mediocrity. It’s an observation about consistency. About showing up. About being part of the background fabric of people’s lives rather than demanding constant attention like a toddler with a sugar high.

The most successful brands often feel inevitable rather than innovative. They’re not interrupting your day with “thumb-stopping content”; they’re part of it.

But try explaining that in a quarterly review. Try justifying “being wallpaper” to stakeholders who think marketing should be measurable, scalable, and optimizable.

What the Secret actually is

The secret isn’t complicated marketing psychology or neuroscience. It’s timing.

Right product, right moment, right disappearance schedule.

Secret bars had the good fortune to exist during the peak nostalgia formation years of a generation. Then vanish before that generation realized they were essentially paying for repackaged Walnut Whip filling.

Perfect timing. Completely accidental.

Which suggests that perhaps the most powerful marketing happens when you’re not trying to do marketing at all. When you’re simply making something useful, or adequate, or even slightly rubbish, and being consistent about it.

The rest is just filing errors in the great library of human memory.

And sometimes, those filing errors are exactly what people are looking for.

The 2,500-person focus group

That Facebook group demanding Secret’s return isn’t really about chocolate bars. It’s about recapturing something that was never as good as memory suggests. It’s about the illusion that simple pleasures were somehow more genuine when we were too young to understand complexity.

The group members know this, somewhere. They’re not stupid. But they’re human. And humans, it turns out, are remarkably good at collective self-deception when it serves an emotional purpose.

This is more valuable insight than any customer survey ever produced. More honest than any focus group ever delivered. More revealing than any behavioral analytics dashboard.

But it’s insight that can’t be actioned. Can’t be optimized. Can’t be turned into a three-month campaign with measurable KPIs and a clear ROI.

So we ignore it. And keep chasing metrics that measure everything except the things that actually matter.

What’s going on?

Here’s what nobody wants to admit: The most powerful brand connections aren’t rational. They’re not even about your product. They’re about when and how your product intersected with someone’s life.

You can’t plan for this. You can’t budget for it. You can’t guarantee it. You can’t even measure it properly, despite what your attribution platform claims.

Sometimes the best marketing strategy is simply existing during someone’s formative years. Then disappearing before they twig you were basically plagiarism in foil.

The human brain. Funny old thing.

And the marketing industry’s response to this fundamental truth? Pretend it doesn’t exist. Build more sophisticated measurement tools. Create more detailed customer personas. Optimize harder.

Because admitting that some of the most effective marketing happens by accident would mean admitting that maybe, just maybe, we don’t know as much as we claim to know.