What do you think about the Baked! Lays' makeover?

Baked! Photos: Twig and Thistle

Baked! Lays is celebrating its 15th year with a packaging design makeover. We could debate the merits of the design but that's been done already by those who are more on the ball than I am (the new design was announced in March).

What I'm more interested in is what you think about the product architecture. Specifically, the fact that there's no more dispute: It's the Baked! line of products and Lay's, Cheetos and the rest now play the role of, essentially, ingredient brands. Take a look at the before and after for Doritos to see what I mean.

Now intuitively that seems all wrong to me. Even if this new hierarchy works from a design perspective and resolves the previous mess, should a generic name that's already used by many of its competitors and can easily be adopted by store brands take prime position away from the iconic brands like Lays and Doritos? Surely not. But, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

The advantage of this new hierarchy is that it allows Frito Lay to put more distance between the Baked! snacks range and other Frito Lay products. This allows it reposition the range, move it further into healthy snack territory and focus on women as the primary consumer target. With market and legislative trends putting pressure on regular snacks, the development and growth of healthier products is a strategic imperative for the company. This explains why it has backed up the repositioning with a new marketing campaign: Only in a Woman's World which connects Baked! to the other healthy snacks in the portfolio (Flat Earth and Smartfood). (Whether this marketing is effective or not is a matter of another debate with comments I've read both on FL's own Snack Chat site and elsewhere mainly critical.)

But I'm still left with the vague feeling that something's wrong with this new architecture. What do you think? Thumbs up or down? What do you think of this U.S. solution vs. the solution that Frito Lay came up with in the UK (where it markets under the Walkers brand it acquired back in the 90s)?

Photo: Brand New