The Campaign

Many children in China bring lunchboxes to school and collect meals from the cafeteria. This offered us an opportunity to leverage a physical message carrier already in children’s daily routine. We gave shape to a simple idea to build upon an ordinary lunchbox and transform it into the first interactive lunchbox that encourages children to practice oral hygiene after meals – Extra Care Box. The care box was designed with an artwork that playfully changes with heat, revealing characters working together to clean their teeth. This fun activation both captures children’s attention and encourages them to open a built-in compartment and chew sugar-free gum after meals. This simple reminder helps improve children’s daily oral hygiene without interrupting their playtime.

Creative Execution

We featured the Extra Care Box in a video and launched it on Wrigley’s owned social channels. The care box was then amplified through a mix of renowned media such as Vista, News Weekly, and Jiemian to enhance credibility. We partnered selected parenting, lifestyle, and well-being online influencers, who used our creative care box as the catalyst to drive organic conversations on children’s oral hygiene after meals, calling for action to help children build good oral care habits. We also activated Mars Wrigley’s employees as advocates through internal newsletters and corporate social platforms.

Results

Our care box demo video launch received 5 million views in just three days. In one week, we reached 67 million audiences across China’s social media platforms and earned 1.4 million likes, comments and reposts, doubling average ROI from previous campaigns. The Extra Care Box started an online conversation about children’s oral health – where parents proactively shared their experiences in helping children practice regular oral hygiene after meals. This showed that our care box resonated with parents and inspired them to influence behavior change in their children. The conversation even extended to professional dental organizations/clinics in China – earning reposts from 54 influencers altogether. Our WeChat account recruited 2,800 new followers in just a week after the launch of the video.

Wrigley’s Extra Sugar-Free Gum wanted to help Chinese parents improve oral health for their children by encouraging proper after-meal oral hygiene habits. Zooming into children’s lunchtime at school, where parents cannot supervise them, we created the “Extra Care Box” – an interactive lunchbox that grabs children’s attention andd reminds them to chew on a sugar-free gum after mealtime for oral hygiene. We received 1.4 million likes, comments and reposts in one week after launching the demo video. Parents commented that they were inspired to influence a behavior change in their children.

Since we should not directly market to children, our focus was on parents with 6-12-year-old children. After all, they have the biggest influence on children’s oral care habit formation. We strategically pinpointed a need and inspired parents with a creative solution. Practicing timely oral hygiene is critical after lunchtime, but parents cannot supervise their children during school time. This daily snapshot helps highlight sugar-free gum’s simple yet powerful health benefits, increasing our call-to-action’s appeal. To truly prompt a behavioral change, we took a bold step further to create a physical message carrier – the Extra Care Box. Our approach is to first earn parents’ attention by offering a solution helping children build regular oral care habits at school. We then educated them on the association between sugar-free gum and oral care through a physical message carrier. Finally, we inspired authentic conversations on children’s oral health by engaging trusted opinion leaders.