DO YOU want a television commercial to remind you of mothballs and liniment? And in these touchy times, should you really be portraying a child accepting sweets from a slightly sinister old man?

Whatever the reason, grandpa is to be pensioned off after a decade of advertising Werther’s Originals, the confectionery that has become one of the world’s top-selling sweets. The long-running series of advertisements show a white-haired old man giving a grandson his first Werther’s, as though it were some pre-adolescent rite of passage. Then the child ages, and passes on the same obesity-inducing tooth-rot to his own descendants.

Bendicks, the British subsidiary of Berlin-based parent company Storck, has decided that the sweet has become too associated with Saga holidays and bowls tournaments and needs a makeover to draw in younger customers. As part of a £4 million advertising campaign, a new series of adverts will attempt to move the image to what the admen describe as a more mainstream position.

That, in English, essentially means: get to the young consumers directly and persuade them that this not just an oldies’ sweetie — as grandpa’s campaign has been almost too successful: Werther’s is now up there with Battenberg cake and Polygrip as an icon of grey purchasing power. The new series remains under wraps, but the company said that it would retain a family theme. Grandpa, they say, is being retired because he is too out of touch with today’s consumer.

George McLearie, of Bendicks, said that the campaign, along with new packaging, would be “contemporary without being extreme”, and would give the brand more mainstream appeal. He told The Grocer magazine: “This is a step-change year for Werther’s Originals. We are trying to retain the very loyal customers and bring in lapsed and new users.”

The company is introducing a 78-gramme (3oz) bag of the butter, toffee and candy sweets to appeal to the chew-as-you-go travel market and between June and August will put 200,000 sample packs in Hertz hire cars.

Werther is an opera by Massenet, a story of romantic old twaddle much like the TV commercials. The sweets, however, are named after the village of Werther in Westphalia, where they were first boiled up by Gustav Nebel in 1903.

There comes an age, of course, when tooth decay doesn’t matter, when sugar doesn’t cause plastic to decay, and when, if you were going to get fat, it would have happened way back in your fifties. In man’s seventh age, it’s a comfort to have a Werther’s in the cardigan pocket. Just don’t give it to the grandkids.

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