Brand: Extra Gum (OEFY)
Project: New Brand Platform
Agency Partner: Elmwood
My Role: Client Strategy & Design Direction
Repositioning a global gum brand from fresh breath to a fresh perspective.
OVERVIEW
Project Overview
Following a dramatic decline in the gum category, we set out to reposition Mars Wrigley’s global gum portfolio for a new generation.
Across Orbit, Extra, Freedent and Yida, we created one unified global brand world, shifting the role of gum away from functional fresh-breath confidence and towards something more emotionally relevant:
a small moment to reset.
Built around the insight that 47% of people chew gum for a mental break, the new positioning reframed chewing as an everyday opportunity to pause, recenter and return to the world refreshed.
The result was a completely redesigned global identity and brand experience that helped turn category decline into growth.
The Challenge
Covid fundamentally disrupted the gum category.
Impulse channels disappeared, established purchase occasions were lost and the category experienced a 60% decline. At the same time, Orbit, Extra, Freedent and Yida needed to operate more coherently across global markets while becoming more relevant to Gen Z.
Historically, gum had been dominated by familiar category conventions:
Fresh breath.
Dental benefits.
Social confidence.
But those functional messages were becoming increasingly limiting.
We needed to find a more meaningful role for gum in people’s everyday lives and create a global brand system capable of expressing it.
Creative Summary
The breakthrough came from understanding why people were already chewing.
47% CHEW GUM
FOR A MENTAL BREAK.
That transformed how we thought about the category.
Instead of positioning gum as something you use for the benefit of other people, fresh breath and outward confidence, we turned the proposition inward.
A small physical action that gives you a moment to yourself.
Chew. Reset. Recenter.
This became the foundation for a new positioning and global design system built around everyday mental wellbeing.
The Concept
From fresh breath to a fresh perspective.
At the centre of the existing identity was an asset we already owned: the Orbit/Extra roundel.
Rather than replacing it, we gave it meaning.
The roundel became the Recenter Ring.
Liberated from the logo, it became a flexible brand device that could interact with people, product, typography and imagery, visually representing that small moment of reset.
The shift gave us a simple creative principle:
When life gets noisy, step inside the ring.
The identity wasn’t simply designed to make the brand look younger. Every element helped move Orbit/Extra from an outward-facing category proposition towards a more emotional, inner-directed one.
The Execution
The new positioning required us to rethink the entire brand world.
The Recenter Ring became the central visual asset, moving beyond the pack and interacting dynamically with talent and product.
We moved away from the clinical whites, freshness cues and functional visual language traditionally associated with gum, introducing a much more expressive world of colour, personality and human emotion.
A bespoke typeface, Chew La La, was created around the rhythmic physical movement of chewing. Characters stretch and flex, while hidden smiles and winks appear within the letterforms, bringing playfulness into the system itself.
The system was designed to flex across large-format OOH, communications, packaging and digital applications while remaining unmistakably part of the same brand world.
Most importantly, the identity was designed globally.
Rather than creating disconnected expressions for Orbit, Extra, Freedent and Yida, we established a unified look, tone and feel that could work across the portfolio and adapt to individual markets.
Impact
The redesign contributed to a 15% increase in sales across China, Germany and the UK, while France grew by 15–20%.
Orbit/Extra became the fastest-growing brand in the Mars Confectionery portfolio, while penetration among under-30s increased and category penetration grew in 59 of 60 markets.
The brand broke through the $2.5 billion sales value barrier for the first time in three years.
