Most healthcare companies nowadays offer toothbrushes specifically designed for children. These products try to lure kids into brushing their teeth with generic sounds that run the risk of getting dull after a while. We thought there was room for improvement. A lot.

So the challenge was to get kids to somehow fall in love with their up to that point unpleasant daily routine of brushing teeth. Different from what has been done in the past, we wanted to really distract them from what they are doing. We wanted them to focus on something fun: stories.

For this purpose we wrote several short episodes. These episodes, 2-Minute-Tales as we called them, put a face to the name “Philips Sonicare for Kids”. Two faces to be precise: Phil and Carey, our two dental hygiene “ambassadors”.

Their adventures were then stored on a special USB-device that came as an on-pack extra and could be easily attached to any Sonicare for Kids. It was promoted via the packaging itself and with the help of eye-catching displays in stores that featured 2-Minute-Tales.

We rounded out the project with www.2-minute-tales.com: a site where Phil and Carey’s little fans could download additional episodes.

We understood that a typical advertising campaign would not be a game-changer. Unless of course, we made the act of brushing teeth itself captivating and fun.

That’s why we came up with something that ALL children like. And it is not videogames or fancy iPad apps but rather something much simpler and timeless: stories.

At first the 2-Minute-Tales were an abstract thing but ultimately they had to go somewhere. Instead of releasing another super-duper toothbrush design that eventually would just go unrecognized, we thought it would be smarter just to ADD something, namely our stories, to an existing product.

That’s why we came up with a special USB-device with an integrated speaker that stores our 2-Minute-Tales and plays them whenever the kids are brushing their teeth.

This device could easily be attached to any regular Sonicare for Kids and was sold for a limited time only across all of Europe.

As we had hoped, our target audience responded very well to idea of 2-Minute-Tales. In fact they liked it so much that they went to their parents and politely asked or, depending on the child, cajoled them into buying the Sonicare for Kids for them. That is probably why the first edition of the 2-Minute-Tales sold significantly faster than the regular ones and additional episodes were downloaded an astonishing 8,557 times up until this very moment.

Due to this success, there are currently plans to launch a second edition.