At the fortieth minute during the two hours ten minutes
flight from Kolkata to Delhi, a lisping voice of an airhostess filled the
cabin. She spoke at length about the quality of Sensodyne, a toothpaste brand from
Glaxo-Smithkline company and said that the cabin crew would be giving a free
packet of the same to each passenger free. As promised, girls with pearly teeth
and red floridly curved lips distributed the toothpaste packets amongst the
passengers. And it thought it was one of the most successful ad campaigns that
could be undertaken by any company that looks for economically above average
patrons for their products. Reason was simple, for the rest of the trip, may be
for thirty minutes most of the passengers kept on looking at this packet as if
it were an amulet containing a secret mantra. Above all most of them were
talking about it from their own perspectives. While very few of them put it
inside the pouch in front of them, majority of the passengers kept it in their
hands or in their pockets. The very experience of holding that packet in hand
took me to a series of assumptions on the generation of consumerist desires
amongst the unsuspecting people.
First of all, any free distribution of a product is directly
meant as brand familiarizing and establishment. In a flight with very less to
do other than reading, sleeping or impatiently waiting for the eventual
arrival, most of the people tend to focus on trivial things which in fact they
otherwise do not do. Getting a free gift spurs up a series of associations.
Primarily it registers that while travelling by a particular flight you have
received a gift. That particular gift, now being a commercial product, fixes
two association through its tactile nature; one, it creates an empathetic
relationship between the passenger and the flight. Two, that product itself get
registered in your mind. These two associations are directly translated into
the notion of belonging to a privileged class. As most of the people do not
travel by air quite often, the reception of a free product from the flight
underlines your privileged position as a person who travels by flight which is
read by your sub-conscious mind as your ‘better’ position in the society. With
the product, now seen within or without the flight, directly takes you to your
air travels thereby your euphoric feeling about being exceptional and
privileged. This also creates an empathetic relationship with the particular
product.
What surprised me further was the packaging style of the
product. This product, unlike many other toothpaste brands does not have a glittering
packaging style. It is plain and simple and almost evokes the feeling that you
have been given a free sample of some skin disease cream or mosquito repellent
cream. But as you have been told that it is a toothpaste, as you don’t have much
to do inside a flight, you start reading the details printed on the cover. The
more you read the more you wonder based on your previous associations with
toothpaste packaging and its visual familiarities, why this product negates the
conventional idea of packaging toothpastes. This wonderment is one strong form
of registering the product brand in your mind. The more you think about it the
more you identify the differences it has from other brands. The more you
recognize this fact and its clinical negation of the conventional, the more you
start developing some curiosity towards it. Now, as you also invest your social
positioning based on your assumed distinctions and differences, you find a
location in this product where you could anchor your difference and
distinction. The product moves several steps into your consciousness and those
zones of desire.
The packaging of this product is further interesting because
of its capacity to generate the curiosity about the content. This has been made
possible mainly by using a sort of glued ends. We are familiar with those
pastes and creams which have a insert-able flap, that means once you have
opened and examined the content, you could push the flap back into position and
close it. Here as you are in flight and after a few minutes as you are going to
continue your journey to home or hotel, you feel like not opening it because if
you open it, it becomes impossible to keep the content from falling out. The
tube coming out of an open end provokes the idea of losing it. As you have not
seen the content, you don’t want to lose it without checking it. So eventually
you toy it in your hands till the flight lands or you keep it inside your
pockets. In a way a passenger is made a slave of a small little packet he has
received from the airhostess. While standing at the belt from where you collect
your baggage, I saw most of the travellers carrying the packet in their hands
or pockets. Some were even in the process of putting it into their bags.
The company perhaps does not believe that all the passengers
who have received it are going to be the users of it. But it does believe that
people are going to talk about it and they are going to relate to it as a
product that is above average. And in a snobbish society, a consumerist product
moves faster than anything else as people like to brag about things that they
do or experience however silly they are. So the company knows for sure that
this product is going to be talked about on the next day by people. And this talk
would further the curiosity. It is just a sort of Pavlovian association. Next
time when you visit a super store and shop for your toothpaste, the moment you
see this brand name all those association of being above average or associating
with the above average comes to your mind. So you for a test case buy one for
yourself. Perhaps your children and wife or husband would resist this new
product. That means you buying two different brands. As you are committed to
your being distinct, at home you start using this product and naturally out of
curiosity the other members might steal a chance to use it for themselves.
Slowly you would see a whole family getting converted into the use of this new
brand.
While in the flight, rest of the thirty minutes we three
friends were talking about this product. By the end of it, we realized that
notwithstanding out critique on consumerism and consumerist products and the
ways in which companies use advertisement for furthering their products, we
still were discussing this product. While a friend said that he need not buy a
tube of toothpaste for his next trip which would be the next day or next month,
the other friend said that it was always good to try a new product. While mine
was mixed with both their views, my idea was to write about the whole idea of
its marketing. Interestingly, after almost twelve hours, I am still hooked up to
this tube of paste. It is still unopened and unused. But I am writing about it.
There could not have been a better strategy to promote a product than free
distributing of it a flight full of bloggers.
While thinking about this product I thought about all the
other toothpaste brands which I have used or nostalgically remember. And the
illustrations used in this article are my nostalgic association with other
dental care products. Once it was burned husk or rice, then it was a curious
smelling pink powder that burned the gums with a sweet cutting pain. Then all
those brands that we all have perhaps used.
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