Soreen | Wordplay
The Brief
Soreen Lunchbox Loaves had a new product claim worth shouting about – containing a source of iron to fuel focus and learning – but the challenge was to make that nutritional truth land in culture rather than simply appear on pack. The brief was to turn an ingredient into an idea.
The idea
The insight arrived via a concept linguists call the vocabulary gap – the growing divergence between the language-rich environments some children inhabit and the word-poor ones many others are navigating. Soreen’s response was Wordplay: a campaign that reframed snack time as learning time, and positioned a lunchbox loaf as an unlikely but entirely natural vehicle for language discovery.
The campaign commissioned research that found seven in ten UK adults believe children today use fewer words than previous generations, while 74% pointed to screen time as the primary driver. The response?
Limited-edition packs, 1.5 million of them, were fitted with a Wordplay insert – joyful new words, playful definitions, and short origin stories designed to provoke curiosity, prompt conversation, and make people smile. The campaign found its perfect front in Susie Dent, the lexicographer and broadcaster whose decades spent championing the oddities of the English language made her not merely a credible ambassador but an entirely natural one. This was not a celebrity endorsement. It was a meeting of minds between a brand with something to say and a person who had spent a career saying exactly this kind of thing.
The campaign commissioned research that found seven in ten UK adults believe children today use fewer words than previous generations, while 74% pointed to screen time as the primary driver
The Impact
Wordplay did not just generate coverage. It generated conversation – the kind that cannot be bought, briefed, or reverse-engineered from a media plan. The campaign’s central argument, that children’s vocabularies are shrinking and that something as small as a lunchbox insert might help, proved irresistible to broadcasters and editors alike. It was debated on This Morning, dissected on Jeremy Vine, and given the full treatment by James O’Brien – three programmes whose audiences collectively represent the broadest possible cross-section of the British public. Eleven national pieces of coverage followed, including the homepages of both The Guardian and The Times.
Online, the conversation travelled beyond the channels the campaign had seeded. Discussions spread organically across Reddit’s parenting and teaching communities – spaces notoriously resistant to brand intrusion – where the idea was debated on its own merits, entirely divorced from its commercial origins. That is the mark of an idea that has genuinely escaped the building.
And then, quieter than any of it but more important than all of it, the packs arrived in lunchboxes across the country. A new word, a short story, a moment of curiosity shared between a parent and a child over a malt loaf. The simplest creative idea, multiplied.
