Supervision for over-the-counter medication advertising is under the jurisdiction of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is highly regulated. All claims and statements must be factual, proven and "on label." In addition, the atmosphere surrounding the marketing of OTC medication is highly litigious. Marketers are often sued for claims they make, rightly or wrongly, and must be able to defend statements in their advertising. Hyperbole, exaggeration and metaphor can be difficult to defend.

Johnson & Johnson’s Band-Aid is an iconic brand suffering the fate of many legacy brands: failing to compete against retailers’ own label substitutes. Moms feel “They all work perfectly well. Why pay more?”

We re-imagined Band-Aid not as a wound-care product but as an agent of distraction for kids who are hurting. We shifted our thinking about the brand from being in the healthcare category to being in the distraction/entertainment business.

We created BAND-AID® Magic Vision, a mobile app that combines the physical bandage with the power of augmented reality - using everyone’s favourite characters, the Muppets.

Not only does the Magic Vision app bring a uniquely entertaining distraction to the scene of playtime accidents, it provides a proprietary Band-Aid experience that retailers’ own label products cannot replicate.

The challenge was how to add value and differentiate BAND-AID® from own label bandages - especially in the eyes of younger, more cost-conscious moms who feel “They all seem to work perfectly well. Why pay more?”

Our ambition was to see if we could create a proprietary BAND-AID® experience that store brands could not replicate – one that would ignite a new conversation around the brand and begin to shift the values of the category in our favor.

The resulting BAND-AID® Magic Vision app combines the physical bandage with the power of augmented reality - and the Muppets. This was one of the first augmented reality applications to use the physical product as the experience’s point of origin.

Apply a Muppets BAND-AID® to the skin, and point an iPhone or iPad at the bandage, much like scanning a QR code. When a child looks at the screen, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy or Gonzo the Great seem to emerge from the bandage and come to life. The BAND-AID® becomes, in effect, a stage on which the character and the child can interact.

The BAND-AID® Magic Vision app was launched for iPhone 4/4S and iPad (2nd and 3rd Generations) on iTunes on May 23rd 2012. Its launch was supported with highly targeted PR and social media outreach - but no paid media support.

Within a few days Magic Vision was among the top 1% of all app downloads in the iTunes entertainment category.

But downloads are only half the story.

Only 20% of free mobile app users return to use an app the day after they download it. By day 30, less than 5% are still using the app.

In contrast, three-quarters of all Magic Vision downloaders used the app at least twice (50% higher than industry benchmark). The average app user opened the app four times, with 30% opening the app seven or more times.

Users have rated the app 4.5/5 stars on the iTunes store - exceeding the average rating by 1.5 stars. The app also garnered a 12.5% share rate – way above the 3.4% industry benchmark.

And engagement translated into sales: average weekly unit sales for the Muppet strip SKU increased by 12.6% in the weeks following the app launch.

When a child falls down, even a small scrape is traumatic and tantrum inducing. Moms use BAND-AID® bandages not just to cover the wound, but as part of an important ritual to distract the child from the ‘boo-boo’.

We realized we needed to re-imagine Band-Aid - not as a wound care product, but as an agent of distraction for kids who are hurting.

Moms have a ‘tool kit’ of distraction devices, including smartphones and iPads. Could a mobile device provide a platform to bring Band-Aid branded content to the scene of the accident and enhance the entertainment value of mom’s distraction ritual? For content, BAND-AID® already had licensing agreements for popular entertainment properties - including the Muppets.

Our strategy was to create a more richly distracting Band-Aid 'Kiss It Better' experience that lives at the intersection of a kid’s playtime accident, mobile devices, and much loved Muppet characters.

Johnson & Johnson’s BAND-AID® Brand is one of the most famous and iconic brands in the world, but in its core US wound care market, BAND-AID® was finding itself increasingly under pressure from stores’ own brands. Conventional marketing strategy had focused on incremental product improvement, but this was yielding diminishing returns.

Moms see the principle role of bandages as being to cover a wound and keep it from becoming infected. Against these modest requirements it was difficult for BAND-AID® to create enough functional differentiation to justify a typical price premium of 20%.