Bottle caps keep consumers healthy, help them make new friends

Two campaigns aim to bring another dimension to plastic bottle tops, helping consumers to drink more water and even make new friends.

Bottle caps are typically fairly innocuous objects — we usually throw them away and forget about them. But they can become more useful with a bit of design ingenuity, as Clever Caps‘ Lego-block bottle tops proved. Now, two more campaigns have aimed to bring another dimension to plastic caps, helping consumers to drink more water and even make new friends.

The Vittel Refresh Cap, created by Ogilvy Paris, came out of the problem that workers should drink around 8 glasses of water a day, but many don’t. The bottled water brand developed a timer mechanic that counts down each hour and pops up a small red flag when it’s time to drink some more water. The timer resets each time the cap is twisted back onto the bottle. As well as ensuring consumers remain hydrated throughout the day, the campaign also encourages customers to drink more water. Vittel trialled the initiative in France and has seen positive results.

Watch the video below to see the Refresh Cap in action:

Coca-Cola’s Friendly Twist is another innovative take on the bottle cap, created by advertising agency Leo Burnett in Bogotá, Colombia. Linking to the company’s recent sharing-themed campaigns, a Coke vending machine was placed on a college campus on the first day. However, customers found they couldn’t open the drink themselves thanks to a custom bottle cap design, which featured a lock that needed to be cracked before the cap could be twisted. The bottles can only be opened by docking one cap with another and working together in order to twist it open. The confusion about the caps encouraged new students to speak to others to work out how the caps worked, helping to spark conversations between strangers.

Watch the video below to see the reaction of customers:

Are there other typically utilitarian packaging designs that could be rethought to entertain consumers and brighten up their day?