Johnson & Johnson’s Band-Aid is an iconic brand suffering the fate of many legacy brands: failing to compete against retailers’ own label substitutes. Moms feel “They all work perfectly well. Why pay more?”

We re-imagined Band-Aid not as a wound-care product but as an agent of distraction for kids who are hurting. We shifted our thinking about the brand from being in the healthcare category to being in the distraction/entertainment business.

We created BAND-AID® Magic Vision, a mobile app that combines the physical bandage with the power of augmented reality - using everyone’s favourite characters, the Muppets.

Not only does the Magic Vision app bring a uniquely entertaining distraction to the scene of playtime accidents, it provides a proprietary Band-Aid experience that retailers’ own label products cannot replicate.

The resulting BAND-AID® Magic Vision app combines the physical bandage with the power of augmented reality - and the Muppets. This was one of the first augmented reality applications to use the physical product as the experience’s point of origin.

Apply a Muppets BAND-AID® to the skin, and point an iPhone or iPad at the bandage, much like scanning a QR code. When a child looks at the screen, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy or Gonzo the Great seem to emerge from the bandage and come to life. The BAND-AID® becomes, in effect, a stage on which the character and the child can interact.

The BAND-AID® Magic Vision app was launched for iPhone 4/4S and iPad (2nd and 3rd Generations) on iTunes on May 23rd 2012. Its launch was supported with highly targeted PR and social media outreach - but no paid media support.

Within a few days Magic Vision was among the top 1% of all app downloads in the iTunes entertainment category.

But downloads are only half the story.

Only 20% of free mobile app users return to use an app the day after they download it. By day 30, less than 5% are still using the app.

In contrast, three-quarters of all Magic Vision downloaders used the app at least twice (50% higher than industry benchmark). The average app user opened the app four times, with 30% opening the app seven or more times.

Users have rated the app 4.5/5 stars on the iTunes store - exceeding the average rating by 1.5 stars. The app also garnered a 12.5% share rate – way above the 3.4% industry benchmark.

And engagement translated into sales: average weekly unit sales for the Muppet strip SKU increased by 12.6% in the weeks following the app launch.