Client: Knorr (Unilever) | Category: FMCG, Food, Instant Convenience Food, Instant Porridge | Scope: New Product Launch Campaign, Packaging Design, Key Visual Design, POSM, Merchandise Extensions, Retail & E-Commerce Visuals | Market: Malaysia | Year: 2025 | Agency: Laugh Contagious Communications, Kuala Lumpur
Instant porridge has been a comfort-food staple in Malaysia for decades — gentle, mild, familiar, and built for moments of recovery rather than craving. Then mala happened. Over the last few years, the numbing-and-spicy Sichuan flavour profile has moved from niche to mainstream, driven by a younger generation of Malaysian consumers who actively chase heat, intensity, and flavours that hit hard. Knorr's challenge wasn't whether to enter the territory — it was how to introduce something genuinely new into a category most consumers had already made up their minds about.
The launch key visual — designed to telegraph heat, indulgence, and craveability in a single frame.
Our creative direction leaned into the sensory truth of mala itself. Fiery reds. Glossy broth textures. Expressive, almost cinematic food styling. Dynamic spice cues that telegraph heat before a single word is read. The visual system was built to do one job at retail and one job online — make this porridge look like the porridge you actually want to eat, not the one you grab when you're sick. Packaging, key visuals, POSM, and merchandise extensions all carry the same cohesive identity: modern, youthful, indulgent, and unmistakably craveable.
The result is a launch system that doesn't just announce a new SKU — it stakes out a new emotional territory for Knorr in a convenience food space that has gotten significantly more competitive in the last 24 months.
On the convenience food shelf — where a new entrant has milliseconds to land its difference.
In-store POSM — translating the launch campaign into the moment of shelf discovery.
The brief for a brand-new product launch is fundamentally different from the brief for a refresh, a festive campaign, or a celebrity activation. With a launch, you have no consumer memory to lean on — every visual, every pack, every retail asset has to do the full job of explaining what the product is, why it's different, and why someone should pick it up the first time. There's no second chance at a first shelf impression. That's the discipline we bring to new product launch campaigns, packaging design, and integrated FMCG launch systems for brands across Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asia region — work built to land hard from day one, across every retail and digital touchpoint at the same time.
Capabilities applied to this project: new product launch campaign Malaysia, FMCG product launch design, instant porridge packaging design, instant food packaging Malaysia, convenience food brand campaign, mala flavour campaign design, food category launch campaign, appetite-driven food photography, packaging design Kuala Lumpur, key visual system design, FMCG POSM design, merchandise extensions, retail and e-commerce launch system.
Launching something new — a flavour, a format, a sub-brand, or a category-first product? That's exactly the kind of brief we love →
