Breast cancer is often thought of as an older-woman issue. But it is more lethal for 15–34-year-old women and since breast cancer screening only starts at 50, self-examination is crucial, yet 46% of women admit to forgetting to check themselves regularly. As young women ourselves who often forget to routinely check our chests, we realised that we could make a difference – for ourselves and others like us. We wanted to find a way that seamlessly reminded us without being intrusive to our regular lives or overly clinical, something that physically nudged this new behaviour. 3.1m of us start a new birth control pill pack every month. This was the behaviour that we ‘stacked’ a new habit in top of. Every sheet of colourful, cheeky 5mm boob-shaped stickies, issued in classic direct way with every new birth control prescription, made the formation of this new habit easy and unthreatening.

Itty Titty Stickies encourage monthly breast and pec self-examination. For many women this is a habit that they have not yet formed. By piggy-backing the existing habit of daily contraceptive pill-taking, we encouraged the formation of the new, life-saving, chest-checking habit. All you needed to do was collect the leaflets, pop 2 bright boob-shaped stickies on 2 consecutive days of a new pill pack and hey presto they have a cheeky reminder. The 5mm stickies were unlike anything consumers had seen before. And utilising the pack itself is a media first. The advice was to affix them to the same day each month, ideally in the first week – which is after your bleed has ended and when your boobs have returned to your own state of normal. An ingenious, original, important 5mm idea.

80% of breast cancer cases in women under 40 are discovered via self-examination and yet 46% of us admit we don’t do it. Our objective was to make the forming of this life-saving habit easy. We also wanted to point our young target towards the time in the month - ie after their period - when their breasts have returned to ‘normal’ and when it is easier to identify changes. Plus we wanted to adopt a cheerful, sassy tone of voice so that we didn’t scare or intimidate our audience and was in line with Superdrug’s tone of voice. We applied behaviour economics understanding about habit-forming to ‘stack’ onto the existing habit of contraceptive pill-taking. Encouraging consumers to choose the same two days of a new pack on which to affix the sticker-reminders both helped with the habit forming as well as anchoring the habit at a time of ‘normal’.

Every handbag-sized sheet of stickers contained an array of 5mm, brightly-coloured titty-shaped stickies. These A6 leaflets were handed out in the Superdrug flagship stores at London’s Battersea, Islington and Strand and Manchester Picadilly as well as being distributed via the Superdrug online contraceptive service. A store window takeover in these 4 flagship locations was live from 21st January to 22nd February showcasing the many weird and wonderful shapes and sizes our boobs come in. At just 5mm in size, our stickers were the smallest stickers that our printers had ever printed - the perfect size to fit on the blister packs and unlike anything seen before. A consumer and media first. Using stickers as our thread allowed us to translate them to digital stickers and GIFs online, creating a visual world surprising and delighting users. 198 OOH followed, running across the UK alongside the launch of Itty Titty Stickies.

This teeny tiny campaign packed a big punch when it came to impact. Superdrug’s social impressions from just our posts, endorsed by our influencer Sharon Gaffka, totalled 60,000. 20,000 sticker leaflets were printed, and all have been passed onto customers. Considering incidence of breast cancer is 75 in 100,000 women up to age 40 (0.075%) that means out of our 20,000 leaflets collected, 15 of those women could have breast cancer. And with 80% of that age bracket finding symptoms through self-examination, Itty Titty Stickies could potentially save the life of 15 of those 18. Superdrug’s Online Doctor click-rates increased by 7% as well as a growth in email subscriptions and 313 QR code scans in the first month. It also featured in leading media publications across the UK, France and Australia. But the biggest result - the lives we might save - is yet to be counted.