A n d r e w s G u m W o r l d

IMAGE: Users Experiential

In our post earlier today, we shared a (widescreen!) video featuring part of an innovative chewing gum campaign conducted by Mentos Gum in Canada earlier this year.

Hessie Jones’ Toronto-based blog hessiej.com goes behind the scenes of the campaign, which encouraged consumers to suggest what they’d do to make the world go rounder. As Jones notes in her post, the campaign was designed to focus on life’s simple pleasures:

The premise: Make Your World Go Rounder was meant to be light-hearted and fun, and make Canadians smile by reminding them about life’s simple pleasures. According to Alison Neil of Cossette [the agency that created the campaign], “In the competitive and cluttered gum market we wanted to bring attention to a product feature of Mentos Gum, their roundness (the only round gum on the market), hence “make your world go rounder… we certainly consider this campaign to be non-traditional. We decided to develop an experiential/User Generated Content campaign to engage consumers, develop a dialogue with them and enhance their brand experience.”

The campaign included a website where individuals could post their own suggestions (a screen capture of the website is above), and the winning suggestion included what became a fun park for grown-ups (complete with inflatable slides) in Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto this past August.

Jones’ post includes a video of the winner of the contest, Danielle Lamarche, and the fun in Toronto that grew out of her idea…

IMAGE: Gum-Out

The aptly named  Gum-Out, with its chewinggumremoval.com site (a mission statement in a website URL!), proposes to eliminate the somewhat ineffective methods of freezing, humble ice cubes and chemicals from the gum removal process. Instead, with syringes, spatulas and gloves, this new product aspires to consistently and effectively break “the bond between the chewing gum and the surface” (to which it’s stuck).

The British website for the company includes testimonials, ordering details (one kit is good for up to 125 discarded pieces of chewing gum), the benefits of Gum-Out, its uses on clothing, in transport, the home, in leisure and entertainment venues, and in schools. As one testimonial on the site notes, the Backwell School in Bristol has happily experienced many of those potential benefits in their trial use of the product:

As a result of your recent mail shot we purchased a batch of your product, GUM-OUT. I must say with slight misgivings, as most gum removal products are not as good as claimed.

However, the problem with gum being a serious nuisance, we decided to give GUM-OUT a try. To our surprise the product certainly handles the job very well even on hard, stamped-in gum. We have used your GUM-OUT on carpets, curtains and children’s clothes with great success and will certainly re-order when supplies run short. May I also add that GUM-OUT is easy and reasonably clean to use.

With many thanks from the cleaning and care taking staff,

Yours faithfully,

Caretaker, Backwell School, Brisol, UK

Arithmetic, originally uploaded by kunja.

We’re always fond of research that shows chewing gum makes you, well, smarter.

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times reported on a research project funded by Wrigley at the Baylor College of Medicine. Those who took part in the study either chewed sugar-free gum during math class, during math homework, during math tests, or they didn’t chew gum at all.

After 14 weeks, the students took a math test and had their math grades assessed. As the Times reported:

Those who chewed gum had a 3% increase in standardized math test scores and had final math grades that were significantly better than the other students. Teachers observed that those who chewed gum seemed to require fewer breaks, sustain attention longer and remain quieter.

While the research didn’t fully explain what the relationship was between gum chewing and math improvement, the lead researcher on the study, Dr. Craig Johnston, said that “there is research demonstrating an increase in blood flow in the brain during chewing.”

The study was presented at the Annual Meeting of Experimental Biology 2009 in New Orleans this past April.

Chewing Gum Art in Venice, originally uploaded by litmanlive.

IMAGE: Media.

Clemenger BBDO, an ad agency in Australia, has helped Wrigley plunge into the world of social media by creating The 5 Feed, a website designed to help the gum company “connect with young people who increasingly demand digital involvement and greater creativity; ‘an audience that is seeking, sharing and remixing culture.’”

In a piece earlier this summer in Media, it described the agency’s creation of The 5 Feed site, “a social platform that invites the public to download and remix works from commissioned Australian designers, artists and musicians.”

 You can explore that site, and do your own remixing of culture, here.

ps Wrigley 5 gum flavo(u)r translation guide from the Land Down Under:

Pulse (Australia) = Lush (North America)

Electro = Rain

Cobalt = Cobalt

PHOTO: Chicza Gum

If you’ve perused the post below, you may have noticed a short reference to an organic and biodegradable gum now available in stores in the UK. We, in turn, got curious and checked out the web to find out more, and found, among other things, a great podcast on the site Make Wealth History (you can listen to the podcast by clicking on the link at the end of this post), which includes the following details on this new gum from Mexico, Chicza:

It’s a great example of sustainable business, creating jobs in Mexico, stewarding the rainforests, and helping to solve the problem of urban staining here in the UK.

Chicza went on sale this week. Louise has been along to London’s Trafalgar Square to meet the directors and do a taste test, in this exclusive report for Make Wealth History.

We also checked out the website for Chicza which talked about how their approach to gum has provided a great, environmentally friendly resolution by creating a biodegradable chewing gum:

Currently, most mass-produced chewing gums use artificial, petrol-based polymers as substitutes for natural chicle. Even those few, very fine chewing gums that still have natural chicle use only small amounts of it and combine it with synthetic gums. That is why chewing gum is such an environmental and sanitary threat to cities all over the world: the polymers in gum bind very successfully with asphalt.

Chicza has nothing but natural, organic gum base, and therefore has all the virtuous features of this innocuous, hydrosoluble, non-sticky, biodegradable source. Easily decomposed by weathering, combined with bacterial and enzymatic biodegradation, it turns to dust and goes back to the soil, just like rotting wood, fallen leaves and other organic material.

Check out the Chicza website for more details on this new type of gum.

Podcast courtesy of makewealthhistory.org. Click here.

 
PHOTO:  Dumfries Civic Pride

Our friends (you can see some of them above) who make up the Dumfries Civic Pride group are, according to their website:

a group of Doonhamers who are proud of Dumfries, the historic town that gave rise to the names Bruce, Burns and Barrie.
We give up our spare time to make sure that you can be also be proud of your town.

We do this, in association with the Dumfries and Galloway Council, by promoting a well cared for environment, which provides businesses, tourists with the right message.

Our work includes:

…Clean-ups - Undertake litter and graffiti removal.

The latter goal that this group has set for itself has led to an audacious suggestion made earlier this week in the Dumfries and Galloway Standard, and that is to ban gum altogether from the UK, much as Singapore has done. As their frustrations increase in cleaning the town centre from discarded gum (yes, ’tis the season for AndrewsGumWorld stories on gum removal in the UK) has led them to write to their MPs to encourage them to take what the group sees as a necessary step.

In the article, group member Morris Service (a most excellent name for a group of this sort) explained the reasons behind their call for the criminalisation of the dropping of chewing gum to The Standard:

“The majority dispose of chewing gum responsibly but there were still those who left their discarded gum on the street, benches or on the back of seats on public transport.”He added: “While this seems a far reaching proposal, it comes with an increasing frustration at the impossible task of cleaning the sheer amount of chewing gum accumulating on our streets and pavements.

“Despite the efforts of Dumfries and Galloway Council employing contractors to remove chewing gum from parts of Dumfries town centre, at considerable expense, the problem has only been temporarily dealt with.”

The council has spent more than £1million on a major repaving project of Friars Vennel in Dumfries, which according to Mr Service is becoming littered with gum already.

In the same piece, a local MP, Russell Brown agreed with the challenges highlighted by the group, and called for local stores to carry biodegradable gum, recently introduced in England:

“I know gum stained pavements in Dumfries are a massive source of frustration for proud Doonhamers. But equally I know it is only the small minority who have no respect who throw their gum on the floor for someone else to come along and unknowingly tread it into the pavement.

“Last month an organic, biodegradable gum hit the shelves of supermarkets in the UK. So an alternative to banning gum – which could be difficult to enforce – could be to encourage local retailers to stock this natural substitute which does not stick to clothing or pavements.”

PHOTO: Bubblegum Math, Oak Park District 97

WebMD reports this week that a recent research project headed by Dr. Craig Johnston, an instructor of pediatrics nutrition at Baylor College of Medicine found in the Wrigley’s funded study that chewing sugar-free gum brought statistically significant increases in standardized math scores and final math grades.

They presented the results of their study at a recent annual meeting at the American Society for Nutrition’s Scientific Sessions and Annual Meeting at Experimental Biology 2009.

Here’s who and what Dr. Johnston’s studied, and found out:

Johnston and his team enlisted 108 eighth-grade students in four math classes, randomly assigning them to two groups: one group chewed Wrigley’s sugar-free gum during school, while doing homework, and also while taking a standardized test; students in the control group didn’t chew gum.

Johnston tells WebMD that students who chewed gum showed an increase in standardized math test scores after 14 weeks of chomping in class and while doing homework, compared to those who didn’t chew.

Gum chewing was associated with a 3% increase in standardized math scores, which Johnston terms small but still “statistically significant.”

The youngsters who chewed also had final math grades that were “significantly better” than those who didn’t chew, Johnston says.

The WebMD piece also notes that other researchers not connected with the study tout chewing gum’s stress reducing properties, noting that “it’s likely that chewing gum can reduce stress, leading to enhanced concentration and thus better academic performance.”

The current online issue of Reliable Plant magazine reports on some recent research on workplace stress conducted by Eclipse gum and the Institute for Corporate Productivity.

It described many of the culprits that you might suspect…time pressure, office politics, deadlines and bosses…and some ways that employees themselves are trying to cope with that stress.

It’s a big problem, as the workforce leadership expert from the Institute for Corporate Productivity notes in the article, with two out of every three employees feeling as though they’re not getting the support they need from their employers.

That expert, Mary Key, suggests there are, at least, some small things that employees can do, and we’re happy to note that (perhaps not surprisingly, given one of the research’s sponsors) chewing gum has a role to play:

“The ability to cope with stress plays a large role in employee performance,” says Mary Key, workforce leadership expert for the Institute for Corporate Productivity. “We found that 65 percent of respondents do not feel their organization is effective in helping them manage stress. That leaves stress management to individuals. While alleviating the time pressures or getting a new boss may not be an option, people can use small tools to beat daily stresses at work, like going outside for a breath of fresh air, closing their eyes while slowly counting to fifty or chewing a piece of gum.”

While chewing gum may not have the same effect as a vacation, new research suggests it is an easy tool employees can turn to when they’re feeling stressed. A study presented August 30 at the 10th International Congress of Behavioral Medicine examined the effects of chewing gum in response to a stressor and found that the use of chewing gum was associated with reduced stress, improved alertness and relieved anxiety.