---
title: "Who Killed Chewing Gum?"
description: "Chewing gum is a category that has almost always been a product that manufactures demand. From childhood fears of swallowing it to rumors about its ingredients, gum has been a constant presence. However, with the rise of mobile payments and changing consumer habits, the Chinese gum market has declined from its peak of 12 billion yuan in 2014 to 10.1 billion by 2018, leading to a loss of its former glory."
author: "IC实验室"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2022-04-12"
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---

# Who Killed Chewing Gum?

> Chewing gum is a category that has almost always been a product that manufactures demand. From childhood fears of swallowing it to rumors about its ingredients, gum has been a constant presence. However, with the rise of mobile payments and changing consumer habits, the Chinese gum market has declined from its peak of 12 billion yuan in 2014 to 10.1 billion by 2018, leading to a loss of its former glory.

Chewing gum is a category that has almost always been a product that manufactures demand.
If you asked me what I feared most as a child, one answer would definitely be "accidentally swallowing chewing gum or bubble gum."
Because adults repeatedly told me that if you swallowed it, it would stick to your intestines.
So when I once accidentally swallowed bubble gum, I thought it was over, I was going to die, and I would die very embarrassingly.
There were other rumors about chewing gum too. For a while, it was widely rumored that gum was made from worn-out leather shoes, and it even evolved into being made from discarded "little umbrellas" (condoms). Each rumor was more absurd than the last.
But no matter the rumor, none of them stopped gum from being woven into our lives.
From childhood favorites like Dada Roll and Bibaboo, to the refreshing Doublemint, and then to Extra, which "protects teeth."
Today, gum appears less and less in our lives. The gum we buy now can hardly be called gum at all, because even the most basic feature, "chewing," is no longer needed; it's more like a mint lozenge.
Today, I'm going to talk about the 30-year-long battle in the Chinese gum market.
The gum business succeeded because people all over the world share a common trait: the habit of chewing on something when idle.
I don't know how psychology explains this. It might be that we retained the trait of grinding our teeth during evolution, so chewing brings stress relief. Or it could be that in the past, when food was scarce, chewing something helped alleviate hunger.
In our country, there's also a history of chewing things to prevent bad breath. When ancient officials went to court, they would hold a "clove" in their mouths, also known as lilac, to ensure their breath didn't offend the emperor.
Shen Kuo's "Dream Pool Essays" and Liu Yuxi's poem "New grace together managing the dog's tooth land, yesterday we both held clove in our mouths" both mention the custom of chewing cloves.
So when gum entered China, it didn't take much effort to get people to accept the concept of fresh breath.
And I think the translation "口香糖" (mouth fragrance candy) played a big role in that.
I believe everyone had a childhood question: What's the difference between chewing gum and bubble gum? And why can bubble gum blow bubbles, but chewing gum can't?
The following concepts might be a bit convoluted, mainly due to differences between Chinese and English. But to clarify the marketing concepts, I think this explanation is necessary.
Whether it's chewing gum or bubble gum, the basic characteristic comes from the gum base, so they can be collectively called gum base candy.
When gum base candy was invented, its characteristics were clearly about chewing and sweetness.
So people added more flavors, sweeteners, and other additives, creating the broader category of chewing gum, making it more durable for chewing and able to maintain sweetness for a long time.
Later, a gum company named Farril introduced a gum that was easy to blow bubbles with, named DoubleBubble, and that's how the bubble gum category was born.
Here I'll bring out my food classification method again. Simply put, it's like this: Class: Sweets, Order: Candy, Family: Gum Base Candy, Genus: Chewing Gum and Bubble Gum.
From the English names, you can see that "chewing gum" literally translates to "chewable gum," while "bubble gum" focuses on being able to blow bubbles.
Because of these slight functional differences, they ended up with different market positions.
Chewing gum is like adult food, while bubble gum is for kids. So we see bubble gum often has more colorful packaging and flashier designs, with marketing focused on "fun."
So the translation "口香糖" is quite clever, as it directly reflects the function from the name—used to freshen breath.
The undisputed king of chewing gum, Wrigley, went a step further and chose the concept of "intimacy."
This choice was very deliberate, because gum consumers are generally under 35, and scenarios related to love and making friends are more attractive to this group.
Based on the "intimacy" scenario, Wrigley divided its brand communication into two lines: Thematic Line (emotional theme) and Pro Line (professional communication).
The Pro Line focused on functional education, highlighting gum's breath-freshening effect.
The Thematic Line focused on emotional connection, emphasizing that Wrigley could enhance interpersonal relationships and bring young people closer.
Under this dual-line logic, Doublemint ads created a classic pattern.
A man and a woman catch each other's eye, eat a piece of Doublemint, then have fresh breath, show confident smiles, and then lean their heads together, appearing more intimate.
Under this model, a series of classic ads were continuously pushed to the market.
This not only completed the market education of "eating gum freshens breath" but also bound gum to intimate romantic relationships through these scenarios.
This advertising paradigm was quite classic.
Look at Doublemint's slogans, like "Fresh breath, you and me closer," "Doublemint brings us closer," and the Mayday endorsement era's "Let's be friends."
They all emphasize both emotional and functional appeals.
After all, young people on dates always want to leave a good impression. Even if they don't have bad breath, carrying a stick of Doublemint is a precaution.
It can be said that Doublemint's success is the success of positioning theory. It was very clear in both functional and emotional positioning, and combined them to create a unified brand image and brand association for consumers.
Plus, Wrigley was indeed rich and willing to spend, so Doublemint ads came one after another.
Within 4 years of launch, Wrigley captured nearly 90% of the domestic market share, achieving near-monopoly. Before Extra became popular, for a long time, Doublemint was synonymous with chewing gum.
The success in the Chinese market made Wrigley's overseas sales surpass its domestic US sales. Even now, China remains Wrigley's most important market outside the US.
Doublemint's strength wasn't just due to its successful positioning and strategy, but also its difference in sales model compared to traditional candy companies.
Many of you might already know this point, but I'll go over it again.
Consumer behavior can usually be divided into planned purchases and impulse purchases. As the names suggest, one has a clear goal before acting, while impulse purchases often come from the shopper's spontaneity.
But gum relies heavily on impulse purchases.
Many people jokingly call it a category that grew up at the supermarket "checkout counter." People often don't pick gum from regular shelves but from the checkout counters in supermarkets and convenience stores, or the hexagonal rotating racks on small shop counters.
Therefore, gum is very dependent on these special locations, making KA (Key Account) relationships and distributor roles especially important. Good KA relationships and strong distributors can help brands secure prime checkout positions and squeeze out competitors.
As a first mover, Wrigley had a strong advantage here that was very hard to overturn. Even if other brands could spend big on advertising, as long as Wrigley firmly held the offline positions, the opponent's publicity would be in vain.
So for a long time, Wrigley had almost no rivals in the domestic gum market.
Only brands like Bibaboo and Dada, which differentiated by focusing on bubble gum, could avoid Wrigley's edge and capture part of the children's market share.
Moreover, after entering the 21st century, Wrigley shifted from its past focus on the vertical gum category and launched aggressive acquisitions.
In 2004 and 2005, Wrigley acquired a batch of candy brands from Spain's Joyce and Kraft, one of the world's largest food companies.
These included brands familiar to Chinese consumers like Zhenzhibang and Swiss candy, as well as a potential competitor: Dada bubble gum.
It can be said that by this point, Wrigley had transformed from a gum-focused company into a multi-brand candy group through acquisitions.
But just as Wrigley was aggressively expanding its categories to build a candy empire, a challenger appeared.
In 2005, South Korea's Lotte and Orion gum burst onto the scene, snatching 20% of the Chinese market share.
How did they do it?
The answer is simple, just three words: xylitol.
After entering the new century, basic consumer education for FMCG in the Chinese market was complete, and basic categories had been popularized.
China's rapidly developing economy and increasingly wealthy consumers urgently needed a round of consumption upgrades to meet more refined and diverse consumer demands.
In the snack and beverage sector, with childhood obesity and tooth decay becoming major social health issues, sugar-free became the theme for category innovation and brand upgrades.
Xylitol, widely used by diabetics at the time, became the most popular sugar substitute.
Xylitol had several advantages. First, it was derived from plants (corn cobs), making it natural, stable, and safe. In the candy market, which targets children, safety was very important.
Second, solid xylitol produces a cooling sensation in the mouth when consumed, naturally matching gum.
Third, the technology was mature and widely used.
Previously, a similar trend had appeared in the US, with major candy companies early on positioning themselves in the xylitol market.
Wrigley was no exception. In 1984, its first product, Extra, was launched in the US. In 1996, it was introduced to China under the name "Yida" (Extra).
That's right, Extra and Doublemint are actually brothers.
When Extra entered China, it coincided with Doublemint's dominance in the market. The company didn't need to promote another sugar-free gum that would undermine its flagship product.
So Extra initially sold quietly only in the Guangdong area, and without even setting up a production line, all products were imported directly.
This gave Lotte and Orion an opportunity.
Lotte knew well that Wrigley had dominated the Chinese market for over a decade, and a head-on confrontation would end badly. To avoid Wrigley's edge, Lotte differentiated itself in every way.
You dominate supermarkets? Then I'll focus on developing pharmacy sales channels.
You push stick gum? Then I'll push bottled gum.
You focus on mint flavor? Then I'll focus on coffee flavor.
Lotte and Orion launched surprise tactics, forcing the old king to retreat. Seeing that it couldn't even maintain 60% market share, Wrigley finally remembered it had a trump card to play.
The task of saving the company fell to Extra.
In fact, both in China and abroad, Extra is a gum brand deeply tied to "health." It focuses on sugar-free, oral cleaning, and post-meal consumption.
But in China, consumers were clearly accustomed to binding gum with some emotion, and that emotion needed to be suitable for combining with product function.
Extra had to choose a new emotional positioning.
This time, they chose the keyword "care."
The reason is simple: sugar-free gum needs to emphasize its tooth-protecting effects, but due to policy restrictions, gum as a food product cannot overemphasize its oral health benefits. A line like "good for teeth" was already considered bold.
By combining "care" with "oral cleaning," they got the classic slogan: "Care for your teeth, care for you more."
With the emotional positioning set, the next step was to find a scenario for this emotion.
Fortunately for Extra, this scenario was already ready-made: chew Extra after eating and drinking.
Based on the "care" emotional positioning and the "after eating and drinking" scenario, Extra launched two series of ads: the 2009 Extra supermarket and convenience store series, and the "Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Spicy" ad series starring Gwei Lun-mei and Eddie Peng, released from 2010 to 2012.
These two ad series were classics. They not only made Guo Biting the "Extra Goddess" and popularized Zhang Yida from "iPartment," but also sparked a wave of "micro-movie" ads in China.
I remember during my college years, when the "Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Spicy" series aired, the latest episodes would frequently appear on my Renren feed, and classmates would often share them wildly.
The classic lines from these ads are too numerous to list.
"Your Extra! No, it's your Extra"
"Your Extra is full too"
"Two tablets together are best"
Interestingly, these ads heavily emphasized scenarios. Whether it was the convenience store purchase scene or the post-meal scenes in the "Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Spicy" series, they were almost like an instruction manual for using Extra.
With precise advertising strategy and a distributor network that reached deep into rural shops and small-town internet cafes and KTVs, Extra captured 70% of the sugar-free gum market, achieving a great victory.
This victory also allowed Wrigley to tenaciously hold onto over 70% of the Chinese market share during the xylitol wave, preserving its throne as the gum king.
From then on, the Chinese gum market entered an era dominated by Extra.
While the domestic gum market was fiercely contested, competition in the global gum market never ceased.
Earlier, we mentioned Wrigley's 2005 acquisition of Kraft's candy business.
This acquisition was a big win for Wrigley. After the acquisition, the candy market entered a period of rapid development, with Wrigley's candy business growing at about 5% annually with substantial profits, and chocolate profits reaching 200%.
For Kraft, this sale was like cutting meat at the floor price.
Regretful Kraft decided to re-enter the candy market, turning its attention to another candy giant, Cadbury.
As a long-established British candy company, Cadbury not only owned famous brands like Cadbury, Halls, and Stimorol, but also a gum brand called Trident, known in Chinese as "Qingzhi."
Many of you might not have heard of this brand because it only entered China in 2015. But in the global sugar-free gum market, it held a 12.95% market share, ranking second, just behind Extra.
To return to the candy market, in 2010, Kraft spent heavily, acquiring Cadbury for £12 billion (approximately $18.239 billion), becoming the world's second-largest gum company.
Just two years before Kraft acquired Cadbury, Wrigley sold itself for $23 billion to Mars, the world's largest food producer and Kraft's old rival. The entire group was renamed Mars Wrigley.
Cadbury and Wrigley, originally rivals in the gum market, each found shelter under giants. A new round of gum war was about to begin.
So why did the giants all set their sights on gum among so many candy categories?
The answer is simple: gum has high profit margins.
After Kraft acquired Cadbury, the company's overall operating margin, which excludes labor and marketing costs, was still lower than the net profit margin of the gum category alone.
As a category with a century-long history, gum is extremely mature in terms of raw materials, formulas, and production technology. There's little technical content or scarcity, giving upstream producers very low bargaining power.
You can imagine how profitable gum is.
To challenge Mars Wrigley, Kraft made careful preparations before entering the Chinese gum market.
It spent a year researching to understand Chinese consumers' tastes and purchasing habits.
Second, in 2011, Kraft split its North American business and global business into two independent companies. The one responsible for North America kept the name Kraft, while the one focused on the global market and pursuing rapid growth was named "Mondelez."
Mondelez's most important market was China.
Mondelez even brought in a new China CEO, with the clear goal of a decisive battle with Mars Wrigley in the candy market.
In 2012, Kraft, or rather Mondelez, officially launched its assault, but they didn't send their strongest brand, Trident. Instead, they sent a younger brand, "Stride."
Kraft set Stride's target audience as young people aged 18 to 24.
Therefore, from strategic positioning to brand image to marketing style, Stride was full of youthful aggression.
First, strategic positioning. Doublemint focused on fresh breath, Extra focused on tooth protection and cleaning, both niche functions. But Stride's positioning aimed to completely overturn the old gum market from the start.
It was like a brash newcomer walking into the arena and shouting at the established players:
You old brands that lose flavor after a few chews should get off the historical stage and make way for the young with lasting power!
Indeed, the lack of chewability was a common flaw in all traditional gums. But previously, both producers and customers treated it as normal. Now Stride came in and poked everyone's weakness, completely ready to flip the table.
Next, brand image.
The Doublemint era favored stick gum, the Extra era favored bottled gum, and now Stride brought out 6-piece and 12-piece "wallet packs."
The innovation in packaging design was, to some extent, also a challenge to the previously unchanging gum packaging.
Of course, the most noteworthy was its marketing style.
In the past, gum advertising focused on dual emotional and functional positioning, emphasizing scenario display. This methodology was basically established by Wrigley.
But Stride ignored all that from the start. It seized on its core selling point, "lasting," and used various methods in ads to show durability.
For example, chewing Stride while writing ideas until sticky notes covered the entire company. Or chewing Stride while doing a spinning dance until breaking through the floor.
Then there was the well-known slogan: "Can't stop at all."
By the time Stride launched, the era of video websites and social media had arrived. This style of purely creative, emotionless, silly ads was naturally more suitable for pre-roll ads to grab attention.
Additionally, for the spokesperson, Stride chose Ko Chen-tung, who had just become famous for "You Are the Apple of My Eye," and hadn't yet gotten into drugs or starred in "Tiny Times." They also sponsored the 2013 "Super Boy" singing competition.
From a competitive standpoint, Stride was still avoiding Doublemint and Extra.
The core customer base for gum is under 35, already young, but Stride was even more aggressive in targeting youth, focusing on a more niche segment. Essentially, it still avoided the main markets of Doublemint and Extra.
Otherwise, just "lasting flavor" without a new core function would make it hard to compete head-on with rivals.
But regardless, "Can't stop at all" had already become deeply ingrained in people's minds. This surprise attack was very successful, and Wrigley had to respond.
To counter Stride, Wrigley quickly launched a new product, "Wrigley 5."
Both adopted similar visual design styles. In response to Stride's "lasting," Wrigley 5 countered with "intense."
However, in the face of "Can't stop at all," Wrigley 5's response was weak and ineffective.
What really held Stride back was the channel.
As mentioned earlier, channels are divided into KA (Key Accounts) and distributors.
KA mainly refers to large chain customers like supermarkets and convenience stores, such as Walmart, Carrefour, and Hema.
Distributors help brands penetrate circulation channels like small shops and small supermarkets.
Compared to Wrigley, which had deeply cultivated the Chinese market for over 30 years, Kraft, which had once given up on the Chinese candy market, had been out of touch with distributors for too long and neglected its circulation channels.
When it came time to compete with Wrigley in internal strength and street fighting, they found that small shops and small supermarkets were all on the opponent's side.
Although Stride had smooth distribution in supermarket channels, it was only walking on one leg. In many places, 90% of Stride's distribution relied on large supermarkets.
This is the ultimate fate of FMCG. You can be creative in advertising, but in the end, it's the shelves that decide.
If time had been sufficient, Stride would have had the opportunity to improve its distributor system and compete with Wrigley.
But unfortunately, time was not on Stride's side.
In 2014, the Chinese gum market peaked at 12 billion yuan, then immediately began a straight decline. By 2018, the market had shrunk to 10.1 billion yuan, with a staggering compound annual growth rate of -3.8%.
It was also in 2014 that a product emerged that had such a huge impact that even the seemingly unrelated gum market was deeply affected.
That product was "mobile payment."
Just as food delivery platforms squeezed the instant noodle industry, the rise of mobile payment squeezed the gum purchasing scenario.
First, the popularity of mobile payment greatly sped up the supermarket checkout process. People spent less time at the checkout counter, so naturally had less time for impulse purchases of a pack of gum.
Second, mobile payment also killed a common past purchase motive: "getting change."
In the past, it was normal to buy a stick of gum at the checkout counter to get change or to round up an order. After mobile payment, the scenario for using small change almost disappeared, and gum as a low-value item lost an important purchase motive.
Looking back, gum is a category that has almost always been a product that manufactures demand.
First, freshening breath doesn't require repeated chewing. The main breath-suppressing agent is the mint flavor added to Doublemint. A breath spray is clearly more effective than gum.
So today's bottled Doublemint is filled entirely with mints. Although our first reaction to Doublemint is still gum, can ordinary mints that have given up the gum base still be called gum?
Second, the xylitol storm raised in the Extra era, though under the banner of protecting teeth, doesn't hold up on reflection. The best way to protect teeth is actually not to eat sugar.
Finally, in the Stride era, gum's functional attributes had nothing left to say, so it just threw wild punches, chasing trends, but completely losing its scenario-based approach.
It can't be said that gum has been eliminated, but in today's era, it's hard to find new creativity.
I remember when I was a child, a small stick of Doublemint cost 1.5 yuan.
For a child, that was a huge sum—even today, when I see 1.5 yuan, I subconsciously think it's a lot of money.
So whenever I had the chance to eat a piece of gum and experience the rare sweetness, I wished the sweetness would never fade, that the Doublemint could be chewed forever, and that the Dada Roll would extend infinitely.
Perhaps like the past, no matter how we wish, it drifts further and further away in the repeated chewing of life, until it becomes tasteless.
There's nothing special about it, except that for any brand, any person, or even any era, sweetness is always fleeting, and tastelessness is eternal.
Source: IC Laboratory (ID: InsightPlusClub)
**Are you "watching" me?**


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