Introduction

5 Gum is a popular brand of sugar-free chewing gum launched by Wrigley in 2007. It targeted teenagers and early adolescents with the “Stimulate your senses” marketing campaign.

If you’re a Millennial or an Older Gen Z you likely remember not just the gum, but also the cinematic advertisements that Wrigley’s made that were incredibly interesting and fascinating for its time. Almost 20 years later, and the 5 Gum are still produced and sold, but hardly anyone knows they still exist; we certainly were shocked to learn that they’re still in production all these years later.

With how over the top and successful the original 5 Gum marketing campaign was, it piqued our interest as to how and why they “fell from grace”. Was it that Wrigley’s just stopped investing money into their ads, or was it an inevitable shift in the consumers when they didn’t really get what they were hoping for?

Let’s find out how Wrigley reached the stars and landed on concrete with 5 Gum and all the factors that contributed to it. This is a story of how marketing can be done perfectly and yet still not help achieve long term success.

The 5 Gum launch was a success

Wrigley noticed something that their competition didn’t – teenagers and early adolescents accounted for one-third of all gum sales in the United States. Therefore, to catch the eye of a demographic that has such an influence on their sales, they started thinking outside the box.

When it comes to products, chewing gum are some of the most mundane things you can buy. Their main benefit is fresh breath throughout the day and that’s pretty much it. It doesn’t have a lot of other unique selling points (USPs).

This is mirrored in typical chewing gum commercials. With Orbit’s commercials, Wrigley usually used quirky humor and the “just brushed your teeth” feeling. Airwaves chewing gum would always go a little stronger, and put emphasis on the intense, physical and sensory experience of its strong menthol and eucalyptus flavour. 5 Gum took that, and raised it to a whole new level.

This is how they did it:

5 Gum Marketing: How they did it

The 5 Gum came wrapped in slim, vertical black cardboard envelopes. They were deliberately designed to look nothing like traditional chewing gum, which usually had more cartoonish branding.

The flavours were deliberately named differently. Instead of things like “spearmint” and “cinnamon; they offered Cobalt (peppermint), Rain (spearmint), Flare (cinnamon), Zing (sour fruit), and Solstice (Fruit). There is real psychology behind this. One study found that highly descriptive names boost perceived deliciousness compared to vague names.

5 Gum used this to their full advantage. Instead of calling flavors what they actually were, peppermint, spearmint, bubblegum, Wrigley gave them names like Rain, Cobalt, React, Prism. “Rain” sounds clean and cold, “Cobalt” sounds sharp and metallic, “React” sounds intense. Even if the flavor was still mint, it felt different because you expected it to.

“How it Feels to Chew 5 Gum”

Perhaps the most interesting part about the whole marketing campaign of the 5 Gum launch were the highly produced TV commercials, set in futuristic environments. It was called “How it feels to chew 5 Gum”
and it became a meme of sorts back then, especially among teens, quoting it and repeating it ad nauseam. Even all these years later, it’s quite a memorable quote and even has its own “Know Your Meme” entry. Go figure.

But the brilliant marketing met a shrinking market

All of this brings us to the key tension in the 5 Gum story. Wrigley did almost everything right from a marketing perspective, but the product category they chose to reinvent was slowly eroding beneath their feet.

“How it feels to chew 5 Gum” campaign basically visually linked a simple stick of gum with amazing sensory moments. By 2011, 5 Gum had become a half-billion-dollar brand with a strong following among teens, and it was praised as one of the most compelling new launches in confectionery for years.

But even at launch, the broader context was telling. Gum chewing among teenagers was already decreasing in the early 2000s, meaning Wrigley was trying to reverse a trend with a single brand. In the early 2010s, 5 Gum’s growth slowed and then reversed. Sales peaked around 2013 and began declining despite ongoing marketing investment.

So what happened?

The category was fading faster than the flavor

There’s was bigger change at play here. Gum chewing isn’t as essential to young consumers as it once was. And several forces contributed:

• Changing habits around communication: live social interactions were changed and the face-to-face social situations where fresh breath mattered became less frequent.

• Customer priorities changed: teens and young adults started prefering products that felt more useful, had longer-lasting flavor, functional ingredients, or easier formats like mints and flavored strips. Compared to that, gum felt less essential.

• Category-wide decline: gum usage in general was falling. Across major markets, gum sales have been declining for over a decade, and COVID-19 accelerated that trend as social occasions plummeted and routine impulse buys vanished.

The result was an unfortunate reality: even a well-known brand with unique ads couldn’t escape the fact that fewer people were buying gum overall.

Attempts to reinvent 5 Gum marketing

Wrigley didn’t sit idly by as sales softened. The brand experimented with new campaigns.

In 2015, they changed the focus from pure sensory messaging to the emotional platform “Life Happens in 5,”. The aim here was to insert gum into everyday moments. These adverts used more relatable storytelling than the launch ads, showing gum chewed before exciting life moments. Sensory fantasies of 8 years earlier were left behind.

The brand also tried interactive campaigns like 5 Truth or Dare, which aimed to reconnect with teens through games instead of traditional advertisments. And even though these campaigns got more engagement than average, they still weren’t enough to stop sales from falling.

Most recently, 5 Gum has tried to modernize itself again by leaning into social media and creator culture. In 2024 and 2025, campaigns asked Gen Z content creators to reinterpret “How it feels to chew” for TikTok and Instagram, and even collaborated with music acts like Katseye to make limited-edition products and social content. This brought the brand back to selling an experience, but in a very different space than traditional TV advertising.

What this case study really shows

The long arc of 5 Gum marketing evolution tells us something important: great execution can’t overcome an eroding core need. Wrigley turned gum from a basic commodity into something recognizable by everyone for a while, but the world moved on.

From a marketing perspective the brand’s change made sense. They tried to:

• Refresh relevance through emotional storytelling
• Re-engage youth culture with interactive campaigns
• Use social media and influencers to reignite interest

These strategies worked in the short term and brought attention and engagement. But they didn’t solve the bigger problem: fewer people see chewing gum as something they need anymore. That’s the reality for brands in shrinking categories, strong marketing can’t create demand when the need is gone.

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