"Treat Yourself a Little Better": Which Toothpaste Did You Choose?

As the market for everyday consumer goods splinters, toothpaste is the most interesting product to watch. The shoppers who buy niche toothpaste have become everyone's target.

Regular article

Asked why she buys imported toothpaste, Ann's first answer was "because I'm rich and I can," and she added at once that she was joking.

Ann works at a foreign-owned consumer goods company, yet she hardly uses the household products her own employer makes. Colgate and brands like it haven't appeared on her bathroom counter in a long time. Three years ago, on a trip to Japan, she bought a tube of Lion at a drugstore, "for the novelty, I guess."

That taste for novelty spreads into every small corner of life, from shampoo to laundry detergent; toothpaste is only one part of it. Small, a young woman from Xiamen, says she first bought imported toothpaste only because a purchasing agent needed her to add an item to make up a minimum order, and "it wasn't much more expensive than something like Crest 7-Effect." Later, browsing at Watsons, she spotted another imported brand, took it home to try, and liked it. Now she uses two brands regularly, both bought directly from Japan through cross-border online shopping.

Marketing departments at consumer goods companies must feel mixed about shoppers like these. They are "unpredictable." Their buying follows no pattern: you don't know what finally made them buy, where they will buy, whether they are just trying something new or will stick with it, or what will drive them when they someday switch brands. Market research answers part of the question, but what comes back is still vague reasons such as "novelty" and "a nicer feel."

When we asked Small what she thought, she said something similar: "Imported toothpaste doesn't necessarily work much better than domestic ones, but I just don't want to go back to the Darlie or Crest I used before." To her, price, efficacy, packaging and brand all matter. If the packaging is more thoughtful — "the colors, the curves, it feels better, and the price goes up too" — she considers that reasonable and is willing to pay a premium for it.

Have consumers become pickier? Open any e-commerce page: under one toothpaste on Smzdm ("What's Worth Buying"), a comment says the packaging looks like facial cleanser, which is weird. For a best seller at one Taobao store, besides reviews like "genuine product" and "works well," there is one that says "finally found a toothpaste that doesn't burn my mouth."

On Taobao, more than 30,000 stores mainly sell imported toothpaste, and a search for "imported toothpaste" returns 122,800 products. That excludes toothpaste from particular brands not labeled "imported," so the real number must be far higher. Like the order-padding and purchasing agents Ann and Small mentioned, this is just one of Taobao's countless small long-tail niches.

How varied people's buying is depends a great deal on where they get their information. Supermarkets and convenience stores of all kinds, Watsons included, once served as "popularizers of consumption." Many people went there not just to restock necessities but to see "what's different." The curious would try switching to another product, and then where a product sat on the shelf, the color of its packaging and whether it was on promotion became the main deciding factors.

Today that role of the supermarket has been taken over by too many other things. People pick up all kinds of shopping information while traveling or on business abroad, during a short stay overseas, on the promotion pages of e-commerce sites, in the featured picks of boutique shopping-guide apps and cross-border shopping sites, and even from the "enthusiastic recommendations" of friends and relatives. A woman who went to Japan on a package tour told QDaily that her tour guide said a certain toothpaste worked well and could help prevent bleeding gums, so almost everyone in the group bought two tubes each.

These people are buying not so much a toothpaste's function as "a feeling."

Ann told QDaily as much: "There's no especially big difference between imported and domestic toothpaste. If I really wanted whitening or something, I'd rather go to a proper dentist."

On iHerb, a website that sells health products by mail from abroad, there is a thread titled "Can anyone recommend good brands of toothpaste to buy from overseas?" The original poster said they wanted to order toothpaste from abroad but "know nothing about it." None of the 10-odd replies offered advice suited to the poster; people simply recommended products they had used themselves, and one answered, "anything that sells well is worth a try."

In another, similar thread that ran to many pages, the original poster showed off five tubes of American toothpaste bought from overseas (they had switched to imported toothpaste after domestic toothpaste was hit by a bleach scandal). The most common responses in the first few pages were "fun" (because some of the tubes in the photos stand upright) and talk about flavor. Only one user, hsintt, seemed to know something: "My own teeth aren't good either, and my gums are always inflamed and swollen with gingivitis, so I know quite a lot about toothpaste. I used to use only medicated toothpaste, and later, once I started ordering from overseas, I bought imported toothpaste, and it really does work better than domestic toothpaste." "Fluoride prevents cavities. In many parts of the United States, fluoride is added to drinking water, so most people use fluoride-free toothpaste. In most of China, the water is still low in fluoride, so fluoride toothpaste is more common. But fluoride toothpaste really isn't recommended for children, because their swallowing reflex is poor and they easily swallow toothpaste while brushing, so to avoid taking in too much fluoride they should use fluoride-free toothpaste."

But you may also have noticed that toothpaste claims really are more specific than they were a few years ago.

Today's high-end toothpastes are each built around one function or consumer need: Pien Tze Huang's selling point is reducing "internal heat" and inflammation, Zact centers on whitening, and Japan's Lion has carved an even narrower niche out of the whitening market: removing smoke stains.

Take whitening alone: Colgate calls its product "Light Sense White professional whitening toothpaste," Crest calls its own "Brilliant White," Zhonghua calls its "Porcelain White," and Yunnan Baiyao has named its product "probiotic toothpaste," not to mention enzyme and "biological" toothpastes. A Nielsen report found that although the traditional claims of whitening and cavity protection still hold a large share of the market, specialized oral-health segments such as sensitivity relief, preventing bleeding gums and fresh breath grew markedly over the past year.

Whatever it actually achieves, toothpaste is one way of dealing with problems in the mouth. Ren Heng, head of the dental department at Bybo Dental, says that although people are paying more attention to oral care, they don't know much more about oral health than before. They still ask her the same kinds of questions as in the past: "Why do my gums bleed?" "Why do I get mouth ulcers?" She has observed that most people's understanding of oral care products still comes from TV commercials or ingredient lists.

In 2005, Yunnan Baiyao launched its first toothpaste, promising to deal with "bleeding gums, mouth ulcers, and swollen, painful gums." It was priced at 22 yuan at the time; even setting aside inflation and other factors, that price would still make it a high-end product today. In 2008, the American brand Sensodyne entered China, also going after the high end. Many people may still remember the "dentist" in a white coat who spoke with a slight Hong Kong or Taiwan accent: in Sensodyne's 30-second TV commercial, consumers were cast, unusually, in the "weaker" role of people being taught, and many heard the term "tooth sensitivity" for the first time from this "dentist."

"Tooth sensitivity" may well be real, but only after Sensodyne did it become a market opportunity that could make brands money. Since then, "tooth sensitivity" has turned up more and more often in the descriptions of all kinds of toothpaste.

In general, the more distinctive and wide-ranging a toothpaste's functions, the higher its price. But many people may not have noticed that the mainstream toothpaste market is not the cheap goods people assume it to be; put another way, the median price of toothpaste has quietly risen a great deal.

Xiang Jianqiang, secretary-general of the China Oral Care Association, said in a 2015 media interview that mid- to high-end toothpaste continued to gain market share steadily: mid-range toothpaste accounted for 46%, high-end and ultra-high-end toothpaste already for 37%, and low-end toothpaste for only 17%. (The market defines "high-end toothpaste" as products priced above 15 yuan per 100 grams, low-end toothpaste as 5 yuan or less, and "ultra-high-end toothpaste" as products priced above 140% of the category's average price.)

Information a JD.com representative gave QDaily lends these figures some support: on JD.com, sales of mid- to high-end and imported toothpaste are growing about twice as fast as those of ordinary toothpaste.

High-end toothpaste obviously carries fatter margins, and brands are trying to tap that market.

At the end of 2015, Oral-B, P&G's oral care brand, launched a toothpaste set that retails for 159 yuan. Its box is labeled "Imported from the USA," and the product description on the tubes is entirely in English. It also introduced a "dual tube" concept: each time you brush, you use one toothpaste for 1 minute and then a second, different one for another minute. The company calls these two steps "repair" and "protect," and the product is meant for gum care.

A person familiar with P&G who asked not to be named described the product's target customers to QDaily this way: young people with money who like to try new things.

P&G did not advertise this toothpaste on TV, because it chose not to. According to data Nielsen CCData provided to QDaily, toothpaste brands spent more than 13 billion yuan on TV advertising in 2015, and cosmetics and personal hygiene, the category toothpaste belongs to, was one of the three industries with the highest total ad spending that year. Put simply, toothpaste brands love television, but this time P&G decided its product belonged somewhere else.

Working from the keywords "likes to try new things" and "young people," P&G ran a pre-film ad for the toothpaste in cinemas showing Sherlock. It also enlisted Weibo influencers to recommend the product, including beauty columnist "Lucky waywei" and fashion blogger "-Smiling As Ever-," each with six-figure followings or more. None of this is new, but remember that this is P&G, the most traditional of companies, and it has not often tried this sort of thing before.

Beyond that, Oral-B's high-priced toothpaste is sold only in a limited number of Watsons stores, Sam's Club (Walmart's high-end membership warehouse) and some upscale supermarkets; otherwise, the easiest place to find it is on e-commerce platforms such as JD.com and Tmall.

"I wouldn't really recommend selling it offline, because the selling points are hard to get across and the target customers are hard to find," said the person close to P&G. Skipping TV ads and not pushing hard into stores should, it seems, have saved P&G a large sum. But according to another person familiar with P&G who also asked not to be named, if you add up all the channel and marketing costs, "what you pay on e-commerce may well be more than offline."

The channel fees he means include, in traditional supermarket channels, barcode fees, shelf fees (charged in most cases), floor-display fees and promotion fees, and sometimes the wages of in-store promoters. On e-commerce platforms these fees take another form: floor-display fees have in effect become fees for prominent "banner" slots, e-commerce customer service has replaced in-store promoters' wages, barcode fees are still charged, and warehousing and logistics fees may be added.

The growth of the so-called high-end toothpaste market has also created openings for small brands. In 2014, Pudilan Daily Chemical Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Jiangsu Jichuan Pharmaceutical, launched a toothpaste called "Keyanning Inflammation-Time Care." It was the first toothpaste this pharmaceutical group had developed and brought to market; the group was better known for "Pudilan Oral Liquid," sold mainly to clear heat, detoxify, and reduce inflammation and swelling. The toothpaste (100g) now sells for 73 yuan, "the highest price of any domestic toothpaste," said Weng Zhihua, marketing manager at Jiangsu Pudilan Daily Chemical Co., Ltd.

Like most high-end toothpaste, Pudilan targets big-spending "successful people": "white-collar workers, successful business people, business owners, opinion leaders, civil servants..." You can almost see their reasoning: these people have money, lead busy lives and care about their health, which makes them practically made for this toothpaste. They pay for safety, pay for packaging, and pay for small preferences of their own that they can hardly put into words.

In this sense, toothpaste is no longer just something used twice a day in the bathroom; it has become a new yardstick for quality of life. Conspicuous consumption used to mean the big TV in the living room and the luxury handbag on one's arm. Toothpaste sits where only you know it is, purely to "treat yourself a little better."

Cover image from blogspot, bro4u.com