March 28th, 2007

Filed under:
PR and Marketing
5 Comments »

Whitening Mint Explosion Plus Scope Extreme

This toothpaste is Extreme!

Extreme Toothpaste

I more or less randomly grabbed this toothpaste off the shelf. When I got it home and out of the box, I thought of one of Seth Godin’s ideas.

He points out that these days its really difficult to differentiate between most consumer products, and nearly impossible to get consumers to switch brands. They’re so entrenched, and there’s so much competition, that they’re liable to stick with what works. He has, as he says, been buying the painkillers in the yellow box for as long as he can remember, and can think of no reason to switch. Amen.

This is one reason I like working in software marketing. It’s an industry where people do regularly create (relatively speaking) new, remarkable things.

The poor marketers at Crest have to try to convince him to switch, and so they’ve created “Whitening Mint Explosion Plus Scope Extreme”. Is it any better than any other toothpaste? I sincerely doubt it.

But it does have that cool green vortex on the tube.

Comments: 5 Responses so far

alexis
March 28th, 2007
12:55 pm

If you were going to tell me to read 1 or 2 Seth Godin books, which would you recommend?

[Reply]

Andrea >> Become a Consultant Blog
March 28th, 2007
1:38 pm

Alexis: anyone who signs up for my blog’s newsletter gets a free copy of Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible. It’s a good taste of what he has to offer. (The form is automated…you can unsubscribe right after you sign up, if you want.)

When I was doing my MBA, my marketing prof was a former P&G marketing exec. She told me a lot of these co-branded products are nothing more than brand names. So there’s no Scope in the toothpaste, no Rolo in the ice cream, no special clear wash goo in the dishwasher detergent.

[Reply]

Jeff
March 28th, 2007
2:15 pm

I like how it says Extreme twice.

It’s like, DOUBLE extreme!

[Reply]

darren
March 28th, 2007
4:50 pm

Alexis: I like “The Purple Cow” and “The Big Moo”. The latter isn’t Godin per se, but 30 short essays he collected from smart thinkers.

Jeff: That’s because they’re obsessively printing both the French and the English. If you look at a larger version, you’ll see an accent over the second ‘e’ in the second ‘extreme’.

[Reply]

Jeff
March 29th, 2007
6:23 am

Ah.

Ok. Forgot about that. That suddenly reminds me of being in a French grocery store; All the labels were French, and as a Canadian, I kept wanting to turn them around to see the English side, only there was no English side.

[Reply]

Add a comment