Bayer: Digestive Health

We defined how future OTC offers in the digestive comfort category should look, taste and be packaged in order to be seen as ‘effective’.

Bayer’s innovation pipeline is driven by scientific and clinical expertise. But for consumers the science isn’t enough - the new offers must look, feel and taste more ‘efficacious’ than the competition. Digestive comfort - heartburn, reflux, indigestion - is a classic problem/ solution space and offers need to immediately and coherently communicate they are the solution.

Our cultural analysis of the digestive comfort category in the USA and UK showed how the whole experience of efficacy is changing, driven by shifts in how we view the human body (no longer a machine with a collection of parts that can be treated individually) and by a changing understanding of the importance of the gut.

Semiotics showed how the category is being left behind by these changes, with codes anchored in older expressions of digestive health and efficacy. Inspired by other categories we built a series of detailed expressions of the new offers, that covered claims and language, sensorials of format and taste, pack form and graphic palettes. These were used to inspire and guide other partners.

And we built a detailed playbook for offers that will emerge further into the future. A framework to position offers within a changing cultural context for digestive health (and versus the existing offers in the market) and to guide the sensorial, graphic and pack form codes that are most likely to deliver that differentiated positioning.