Why this Sensodyne ad feels every way right?

A narrative analysis of a 20-sec TV commercial on marketing grounds

Have you ever felt connected with a toothpaste ad? In my case, never. Most of the time, the problem they claim to solve doesn’t feel real and neither does the way they communicate it. In trying to understand where a TV ad can fail, let’s take two examples:

1. In a red toothpaste ad, they claim to solve our foul breath problem, causing our breath to smell pleasant. And they demonstrate it by showing us a boy and girl falling for each other seemingly for how they smell when they open their mouth. The recent version of this years-old ad slightly differs by involving a married couple, having nothing else evolved in their story-telling sense. First of all, I doubt if the foul breath is such a major and widely faced issue. Even if it is one, people would rather try some medical or herbal solutions than relying on toothpaste.

2. This is the salt-added variant of a brand. The goal of the ad is to let us know the significance of having salt in our toothpaste and that their product has it. The ad has different versions with changes in locations, but what’s common among them is the surprise visit of a reporter-like woman with her crew to inquire us if our toothpaste has salt. Despite fully understanding that the logicless entry of the woman and the exaggerated narrative are the distinct and attention-grabbing ingredients of the ad, I doubt if it has succeeded in earning our trust for that product/brand.

I won’t say that a less serious narrative doesn’t sit well with the promotion of a health-related product. No matter the genre, I believe any ad in its whole should convey the essence of the product it speaks for. It should be a narrative extension of the soul of the product, which can’t be used for any other product, even for its likes. Watching such an ad hits you like an experience, where you naturally don’t get to think about it but just feel it. Sensodyne’s ad is one such kind that left me in a similar state, and here we go:

Running for 20 seconds, comparatively the shortest of its counterparts’, this visually vibrant ad, with equally captivating pop music, hooks you right from its first second. But before going into the narrative, let’s see the core idea the ad carries in it. Marketing veteran Ken Segall in his NY Times bestseller ‘Insanely Simple: the obsession that drives Apple’s success’ walks us into the core organizational virtues that make Apple successful. One of them is the virtue of ‘Think Human’. As an example, he says, ‘Apple didn’t describe the original iPod as a 6.5-ounce music player with a five-gigabyte drive. It simply said, 1000 songs in your pocket’. I presume the same virtue is being taken care of behind this Sensodyne ad too. Instead of orbiting around what their toothpaste can do, like killing 99% germs and strengthening the teeth, or going too far to show us some dreamy possibilities, like impressing our partner with white teeth and fresh breathe, this Sensodyne ad dives right into the majorly felt purpose of having teeth: eating the food we like before the moment is gone. Enjoying ice cream when it’s cold, drinking filter coffee when it’s hot, eating sweets, and tasting spices. As simple as that.

Now can you feel that the text is naturally progressing towards the product’s identity, leaving behind the ad discussion? This is where the campaign proves successful. The end goal of any marketing effort is to let us know what a product/brand means to us. So that further suggests us the logic, for any ad or marketing campaign to reach our heart, the product it speaks for should be great by itself, only which opens the doorway for a great marketing campaign.

And retrieving the previously mentioned ‘trust’ part, I would say no product can be cent per cent trusted through its advertisement. Yes, it’s all about narratives. You can just paint it the way you want. But still, you can earn the highest possible level of trust by sounding original. A product genuinely created to solve people’s problems, with so much passion and effort gone into it, will naturally possess its own voice, which none other products can have, just like human beings. And that’s the only guiding factor for us to create an original marketing campaign. So when an ad feels original, it must be the extension of a truly valuable product, which is why it is relatively safe to equate the campaign’s originality to the product’s quality. I hope this answers the ‘trust earning’ part.

While going totally appreciative about this ad, let’s also know that the team didn’t come up with this excellent idea right after their decision to make a TV commercial. They had their own path of evolution, too. Below are the two videos that were made before the above-seen latest one. Though less intriguing than it, you can see in both videos the brand’s conscience to set itself apart by being distinct and original right from the start of their marketing commitment:

Even in this video, the theme remains the same: answering sensitivity. Just the way it is taken to us differs. There is one more video, older than these two, removed with regard to controversy as the government of India deemed it misleading because it involved a UK-based doctor (an Indian though) endorsing a healthcare product in India. However, to give a verbal hint, the video would have conveyed the idea of Sensodyne answering our tooth sensitivity in a real doctor’s words. The second one became more moment-focussed by closely showing us grimacing faces in slow-mo, finishing with frames of the brand and product. Their attempt to engage us with the moment of experiencing sensitivity makes the ad unique and meaningful. This ad marked the start of people’s attention gravitating towards the brand.

If not compared with the latest one, these two are great works amidst other brands’ unnatural elite-leaned family dramas, where you see a baby advising her dad about the micro-sized germs in his mouth. However, after these two ad pieces had their time serving their purposes, ie the ‘answering sensitivity’ campaign, the makers via survey found that people have become aware of the sensitivity science and it’s time for their campaign to take a lifestyle-like approach instead of giving people medical advice. Also, they preferred focussing on the positive side of our relationship with food than revolving around pain and discomfort. There came the one which we’ve been talking about from the beginning, where we see only ultra-close-up shots of food, food and food. The message appears in white text over the frames directly communicating to us all they have to say about their product, not to mention the cheerful music playing around. The people behind it name it as ‘Fotheloveof’ campaign.

You can see how well-packed the whole ad turned out to be, where every frame counts. But of course, common consumers wouldn’t be breaking down all these; they just get simply connected with the product. I think a well-made marketing campaign should be barely visible as a medium; its role is to just blur the line between the consumer and the product and get them in direct connection with it.

Finally, I am closing this by mentioning one more important aspect of the ad. It is quite uncommon to see socially non-discriminating TV commercials, but in this Sensodyne ad, we don’t see model-like mothers seeking tooth solutions for their rich kids and approaching only white-skinned doctors.¹

1. The agencies behind the ad are Grey India and Wunderman Thompson. The videos belong to Sensodyne India and it has total ownership and authority over the video content.