Although the Tums brand has been gracing American medicine cabinets for more than 75 years, the brand faces increasing competition from private label products that attract consumers with lower prices. To help maximize Tums' product differentiation, GlaxoSmithKline partnered with design and branding agency Anthem Worldwide.
"Basically the big push was to graphically further set the Tums brand apart from the national brand in competition but more specifically from private label," Janice Jaworski, managing director at Anthem Worldwide - New York explains. "Because what private label has started to do in the last year or two is actually mimic the structural shape and get away with it."
There were three goals for the project: increase visual presence at-shelf; optimize shop-ability; and create clear differentiation from the competition.
"We ended up optimizing the communication on the label, which created a more proprietary and ownable mark for the Tums brand," Jaworski states. "So, where yes, private label can say ‘antacid tablets', they can't say Tums.
"We did a series of design explorations and came up with, at the end of the day, an elliptical device, a contained, extractable branding unit, if you will, that contains the word Tums," she explains. "This graphic evokes the idea of speed and efficacy and presents the Tums branding in a fashion that really starts to make it more ownable."
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