To expand on what the brand positioning “For the bold” means and tell the world, “There’s nothing bolder than being yourself,” Doritos decided to “come out” in support of those who haven’t yet, and created a totally new product that stood as a social platform of support. Each bag contained rainbow-colored chips and a quote of support on the back, submitted by members of the LGBT community. Doritos Rainbows were available only online at DoritosRainbows.com. To claim a bag, visitors first decided how much they’d donate—starting at a minimum of $10—and could tweet a quote of support with the hashtag #boldandbetter. All the donations went to the It Gets Better Project in furtherance of its mission to inspire hope among LGBT youth and fight suicide. The bags were delivered via mail in the weeks leading up to National Coming Out Day.

Doritos Rainbows starts with the development of the first bag of multicolored, rainbow-inspired chips ever created by Doritos and involved the entire company. The package was designed to allow each bag to feature a quote of support from someone in the LGBT community and was printed digitally to allow for diversity. In other words, each bag was a personal message of support. We partnered with the It Gets Better Project in its mission to inspire hope among LGBT youth and built a website that allowed donations to be made directly to the foundation. On September 16, 2015, Doritos Rainbows was launched with posts on Facebook and Twitter and with a press release. In 12 hours the product had garnered over 1 billion impressions all over the world, and the #boldandbetter hashtag had flooded social networks, the news, blogs and media outlets. By that night all 11,500 bags had been claimed.

Doritos Rainbows was the most successful product announcement in Frito-Lay’s history, with 1.5 billion media impressions in 12 hours and nearly 2 billion media impressions total—$170 million in ad-dollars equivalency—with positive sentiment of 84% in the coverage. All the bags were claimed in 24 hours, raising $180,000 for the It Gets Better Project, their largest donation ever. Doritos Rainbows was a top trending topic on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram simultaneously, above the Pope’s visit to the U.S. Each post on Instagram generated 175% more likes than average—the brand’s followers doubled, with 20,000 new followers. Posts about Doritos Rainbows on Twitter generated 500% more retweets and 300% more likes than the average brand post, and 95% of the tweets were positive or neutral despite the sensitive subject. On Facebook, posts generated 30 times more shares than average, 12 times more likes and 70 times more comments, reaching 10 million people.