BRAND MARKETING

How Colgate, the Famous Minty Goop,

Found Its Way Onto Your Toothbrush

|Sometime around 1892, a Connecticut dentist named Washington

Sheffield—who'd introduced toothpaste to America in 1850—received
a letter from his son, Lucius. While studying art in Paris, Lucius had
watched realist painters squeezing their oils out of tin tubes and
thought the container would be a novel way for his father to package
his own product. The dentist agreed and began selling his Doctor
Sheffield's Crème Dentifrice in tubes.

It's a great story of American innovation, and the reason nobody

much remembers it is because, four years after Sheffield's dispenser
debuted, a more established brand of toothpaste out of New York
adopted the tube. That brand was Colgate.
While Procter & Gamble's Crest is the category leader—with a 34.2
percent share of the market, per
Euromonitor—Colgatetoothpaste,from Colgate-Palmolive, is the
brand that has stood the test of time.

As New York dentist and media personality Thomas Connelly points

out, toothpaste isn't much of a differentiated category. "It's a staple,
it's habitual, and there are not a whole lot of benefits to changing," he
noted. So why do people keep reaching for that red and white tube—to
the tune of $314 million last year?

It's part timing, part marketing. Though challenger brands have

chipped away at its dominance, Colgate has never surrendered the
advantages that come with being first to market. (Samuel Colgate
began selling his toothpaste in jars in 1873.) "It's the law of first in,"
said Adam Padilla, founder of consultancy BrandFire. "Colgate was
the first, and they originated the tube. Once you have that foothold,
you are the immovable piece that everyone else reacts to." Colgate
didn't just popularize the tube—in 1908, it also added a rectangular
opening that forced the paste out in a ribbon shape, a simple
innovation that let Colgate position itself as the "ribbon dental cream"
for years.

But innovation has also hurt Colgate. In 1955, when P&G introduced
Crest—fortified with a magical ingredient called fluoride—it
immediately bit off 10 percent of the market and, starting in 1960,
would lead the category for the next three decades. (Colgate would
finally add fluoride in 1968.)

Still, Colgate is seen as the stalwart brand, the inevitable brand, the
family brand of toothpaste. And that's no accident. Because parents
tend to introduce their kids to toothpaste and because adults usually
buy the brands they remember from childhood, Colgate continues to
enjoy a kind of pass-down popularity that's difficult to efface, Padilla
pointed out.

"When you teach your kids, 'Daddy says use Colgate,' they'll stay with
the brand," he said. "Once you're in there, you have that recognition.
Attach 100 years of longevity to that and you're immovable."