What Wattie’s, L&P and Swanndri Get Right
Walk down a New Zealand supermarket aisle and you’ll find decades doing some of the heaviest lifting in the room. A jingle from your childhood. A bottle shape you’d recognise blindfolded. A checked woollen shirt that hasn’t really changed since before your grandparents were born. None of this is accidental. None of it is sentimentality dressed up as strategy.
We talk a lot about brands that people understand, remember and choose. Nostalgia, used well, is one of the most efficient ways to get there. It works because recognition removes friction. A familiar brand asks less of a buyer’s attention, less of their trust, less convincing. The brands that get this right aren’t coasting on the past. They’re treating it as working capital.
Three Kiwi brands show three different ways to spend it.
Wattie’s: the confidence to come home
For the first time since 2021, Wattie’s went back to market this year with a single, unified brand campaign. It’s Wattie’s You Need is built around moments the brand has quietly owned for 90-odd years. Beans on toast. Spaghetti. Tomato sauce at the barbecue. Hawke’s Bay peaches and ice cream. It landed at a genuinely difficult moment for the business too. The brand openly acknowledged a year of necessary change behind the scenes.
The easy move in that position is reinvention. A new look, a new tone, some distance from the past. Wattie’s did the opposite. They leaned harder into the brand’s long-standing habit of writing jingles people actually remember. The scenes felt current, not dusty. Kantar New Zealand named it May’s Ad Impact Award winner. The judges praised it for refreshing an icon without ever loosening its grip on what people already loved.
The lesson: when a brand has real history to draw on, the bravest move is often recommitment, not reinvention. A confident return to what already works can outperform a platform built from scratch. The tone just needs to move with the times, even when the underlying truth doesn’t.
L&P: laughing at your own past, then doing it again
“World Famous in New Zealand” has outlived every bottle redesign it’s ever introduced. Saatchi & Saatchi wrote the line in 1993. It became one of the most borrowed phrases in the country precisely because it wasn’t trying to impress anyone. It celebrated a very Kiwi, big-fish-small-pond pride, and meant it half-jokingly.
The cleverest use of that nostalgia wasn’t the original line, though. It was what L&P did with it in 2005. Ahead of a packaging overhaul, the brand ran a campaign built almost entirely around mocking New Zealand’s own recent past. Think stubby shorts, jandals, and the inevitable call to “bring back the mullet.” The tagline shifted, briefly, to “World famous in New Zealand since ages ago.” It ran for months before the new bottles ever reached a single shelf.
Same playbook, bigger change
Twenty years on, L&P is running a version of the same play for a much bigger change. In April 2026 the brown bottle disappeared for good. It’s the first packaging change in the brand’s 119-year history. It starts with L&P Zero Sugar, ahead of the rest of the range.
The reason is entirely practical. Clear PET gets recycled back into food-grade plastic far more often than coloured plastic does. Coloured plastic mostly gets downcycled into things like park benches instead. But the comms around it weren’t practical at all. They were reassured, almost word for word. The recipe hasn’t changed. The logo sits exactly where your eyes expect it. The NZ map on the label got bigger. That’s specifically so people can still spot the bottle in the chiller without thinking about it.
Still the same L&P
Coca-Cola’s NZ marketing lead summed it up simply, calling L&P “still the same old L&P Kiwis have known forever.” Down in Paeroa, the giant roadside bottle landmark even got a temporary half-brown, half-clear paint job. It let locals watch the handover happen in real life, rather than just read about it.
The lesson: nostalgia lands deeper when it’s funny about itself rather than precious about itself. It does just as much work as plain reassurance when the change is real and unavoidable. Either way, the principle is the same. When something structural has to change, you protect every recognition cue you don’t have to touch. People will accept a new bottle, a new system, a new price model. But everything else has to still look, sound and feel like the brand they already trust.
Swanndri: when doing nothing is the strategy
The Swanndri bush shirt has barely changed since a tailor added its hood and laced front in 1927. Nobody has tried to modernise the tartan or soften the wool. And yet, over the past century, that one unaltered garment has been claimed by farmers, trampers and skateboarders. More recently, it’s a wave of heritage streetwear buyers. They’re finding it through vintage racks and overseas country-clothing retailers, picking it up as the next quietly cool import.
Nobody at Swanndri engineered that crossover. The”swannie” simply stayed honest enough, for long enough, that new audiences found their own meaning in it.
The lesson: not every brand needs a nostalgia campaign to benefit from nostalgia. Sometimes protecting the integrity of the original is the entire strategy. New relevance arrives on its own schedule, not yours.
The throughline
None of these three manufactured a history to lean on. Wattie’s, L&P and Swanndri each had decades of genuine presence in New Zealand life to draw from. The work succeeded because it respected that history rather than performing it. That’s the part worth sitting with before reaching for a retro filter or a throwback campaign. Nostalgia only compounds when the underlying brand truth is real.
Borrowed history reads as borrowed.
If your brand has years of trust, recognition and meaning sitting underused, that’s the kind of brief we’re built for.
