I get most of my ideas in the shower, shaving, or brushing my teeth. Why? I dunno. But this morning, my thoughts turned to thoughts about toothpaste, odd as that my seem.

As an advertising/marketing guy, I can’t watch TV spots without analyzing them (any more so than I can go to the symphony and not dissect the orchestra’s performance…such is the price you pay for being a musician). Over the years, I’ve discovered something. The toothpaste ads – all of them – are lying to us. Let me explain…

Watch an ad for toothpaste. Inevitably, they’re gonna show someone squeezing toothpaste from a tube, onto a toothbrush. Now watch how much they apply. See? They fill up the brush with a long line of toothpaste. Now talk to a dentist, and they’ll tell you a little dab’ll do ya – just a pea-sized amount is all you need. Read the packaging, and they might recommend “pea sized amounts” for children, but nowhere do they say that for adults. Try it sometime. You’ll notice something’s missing from your sink – a bunch of unused toothpaste.

Now I can’t fault P&G or any of the other members of “Big Toothpaste” for telling us that their brand is better. I expect that. I can’t fault them for trying to convince us that their concoction has some secret ingredient that somehow makes teeth whiter, me better-looking, and much more likely to score with the ladies. (If that worked, I’d be in a LOT of trouble with Mrs. Digital.) But I can fault them for trying to convince us to use two or three times as much of their product as I actually need to.

A few years back, Tabasco ran a bunch of TV. The spots were clever. Innovative. Memorable. Only one problem…they didn’t really work. Sure, they made people think about Tabasco. They rasied “brand awareness” as we marketing types say. But they didn’t increase sales, which, after all is the Holy Grail of advertising. Tabasco’s CEO was talking with one of his managers (not the marketing guy, I might add) about the problem. The manager responded, “why don’t you just make the hole in the bottle a little bigger?” They did, and sales jumped significantly – and permanently.

As a Tabasco fan, I’m not at all opposed to using more Tabasco. And note that Tabasco didn’t do anything underhanded – they don’t show some mook on TV dumping half a bottle on his gumbo. What they did do is to solve a problem. I doubt many customers noticed, and if they did, they simply put a dash or two less on their food, if they felt it was too spicy.

When I first heard about the pea-sized toothpaste thing, I frankly rebelled against the idea. After all, everything I learned about brushing came from TV. Then it dawned on me – you can’t believe anything you see on TV. I tried the pea-sized deal for myself, and started spending half as much on toothpaste.

What’s this mean to you? Well, I might have just saved you a few bucks per year on toothpaste. But think about it in terms of your own marketing. Are you changing your packaging or your approach to encourage them to use a little more? Or are you doing something that is disingenuous to your customers? One is ethical. The other decidedly is not. When you’re thinking about this, remember, Karma is a cruel mistress – and nobody gets out of here without paying, sooner or later.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under advertising, marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.