Business language is full of phrases we don’t expect anyone to take seriously. Agencies promise “fresh thinking”. Insurers say “we’ve got your back”. Coffee shops offer “a breath of fresh air”. Nobody expects the insurer to turn up and physically stand behind them, and that’s sort of the point. Taglines are figures of speech, and we all agree to leave them that way.
KitKat has been saying “Have a break” for nearly seventy years. This year, its team in Panama and the agency Ogilvy Colombia asked the question nobody usually asks of a slogan: what if we meant it, word for word?
The answer was a chocolate wrapper that blocks your phone signal. It’s a lovely piece of thinking, and the method behind it is far more useful to a small business than the wrapper itself.
What if we meant it?
The product is called Break Mode. It looks like a normal KitKat wrapper, but inside it’s lined with layers of copper, nickel and polyester. That makes it a Faraday cage, a pouch that stops radio signals reaching whatever’s inside. Eat the chocolate, slide your phone in, and the calls, notifications, Bluetooth and GPS all go quiet (Dezeen).
What makes it clever isn’t the engineering, which has been around since the 1800s. It’s the creative move. For decades, “a break” meant a mood: a cup of tea, a pause, four fingers of chocolate. Ogilvy treated it as an instruction instead. In 2026, the thing most likely to interrupt a break is the phone in your other hand, so a literal break means a break from that.
There’s a reason this kind of thinking feels fresh. Once a phrase becomes familiar, we stop hearing what it says. Psychologists call a version of this semantic satiation: repeat a word often enough and it starts to lose its meaning. Brands do the same thing to their own taglines. Reading yours as if for the first time, and asking what it would mean if it were true, is a cheap way to see it again.
The wrapper’s second job
The literal idea is the spark, but the design thinking shows in the details. Two choices stand out.
The first is where the solution sits. Design thinking starts by looking closely at the moment a problem happens, rather than the moment it’s convenient for a business to address it. The break is interrupted by the phone, and at that exact moment the customer is holding a KitKat. The fix is already in their hand. There’s no app to download, no separate gadget to remember, no habit to build. It’s hard to design something more frictionless than that.
The second is the job of the packaging. A wrapper normally does one thing: it protects the chocolate until you open it, and then it’s rubbish. Break Mode reverses the order. The wrapper’s real work only starts once the chocolate is gone, and Dezeen reports it’s designed to last about a year. Most businesses design up to the moment of the sale and stop. Asking “what happens after?” is one of the simplest ways to find an idea nobody else in your industry has spotted.
Tested at a concert, not in a boardroom
The third clever decision is about what happened next. Rather than mass-producing the wrapper, Ogilvy took it to three places full of young, phone-attached people in Panama: a tech fair, a big concert and a university campus. They handed it out, watched what people did, and filmed the reactions. Ogilvy’s regional chief creative officer told Fast Company that commercial viability is “still under evaluation”.
That’s the prototype-and-test stage of design thinking done properly. A concert is a brutally honest testing ground. If people will happily put their phones away there, the idea has legs. If they won’t, far better to learn it at a handful of events than after a full production run.
It’s also a useful reminder that we don’t know yet whether Break Mode works as a business. No sales or reach figures have been published. What we can admire is the process: a bold idea, tested cheaply, in public, before anyone bet the budget on it. (We’ve written about doing this on a small budget in Design Thinking on a Small Business Budget.)
Try it on your own words
You don’t need Ogilvy to borrow the method. It works best as a fifteen-minute exercise with a pen and whoever knows your customers well.
- Write down the words you use most. Your tagline, plus the phrases that keep turning up on your website, proposals and social posts.
- Read each one as a literal instruction. Ignore what you meant. What does it say?
- Ask where the customer is when it matters. What are they holding, doing or worrying about at that moment?
- Sketch the smallest thing that would make it true. Something a customer could see, touch or use, ideally something you already give them.
- Try it on a few real customers before you commit. Your version of the concert.
A few hypothetical examples show how it plays out:
- An accountant who promises “peace of mind” takes it literally and sends a short message the day after every filing deadline: “Done. Nothing for you to worry about.” It costs nothing and removes a very real 2am worry.
- A cleaning company that says “a breath of fresh air” leaves every window it cleaned slightly open for ten minutes before leaving, so customers walk into a home that literally smells fresh.
- A landscaper whose line is “rooted in the community” gives every new client a seedling from a local nursery. A small, living version of the promise that sits on their windowsill for months.
Some of your phrases won’t survive the exercise, and that’s useful too. If you can’t picture what “world-class solutions” would look like in a customer’s hands, your customers probably can’t either.
Say what you mean, then mean it
We tend to assume great ideas come from somewhere mysterious: a flash of inspiration, an expensive agency, a person who just “thinks differently”. Break Mode came from something much more ordinary. Someone read a sixty-eight-year-old slogan slowly and asked what it actually said.
That question is available to every business, whatever its size. Your words are already sitting there, on the van, the website and the bottom of every email. One of them might be hiding your next good idea. You just have to stop treating it as a figure of speech.
Sources
- KitKat reimagines packaging as signal-blocking smartphone pouch, Dezeen, 13 May 2026
- KitKat’s newest product is a Faraday cage, Fast Company, 27 April 2026
