How a Toothpaste Package Became the Deciding Factor

Do you live with one of those people that doesn’t put the toothpaste cap back on?!  My none-year-old son is that person at our house.  Thankfully he has is own bathroom, so I don’t have to live with the crusty toothpaste all over the sink on a daily basis.  I thought that having him clean the crusty toothpaste would make him realize that putting the cap back on was a good thing.  Nope.  I thought that having the toothpaste crust all around the top and no longer come out of the tube would make him adjust his behavior.  Nope.

I could see that it wasn’t bothering him nearly as much as it was bothering me.  I needed a solution – and one that didn’t require him to do anything.

Apparently, I’m not the only person that has this issue.  After decades of uncreative, basic tube packaging, toothpaste started coming in packages that weren’t tubes!  This was definitely an improvement.  Then, the other day, I was in the grocery store, looking at toothpaste packages and wondering which one would crust the least, when I saw the new Sensodyne package.  It wasn’t a tube at all.  It was a CAN with a  dispenser that looked more like it was meant for make-up than toothpaste. That was all I needed to see.  I snapped it up lickety split.

Don’t Forget About Packaging

While I’m sure that the Sensodyne marketing team wasn’t really targeting kids or even people who don’t put the cap back on – their packaging was a HUGE influencer in my buying decision.

Packaging creates first impressions, it communicates it’s it’s own kind of billboard.  Yet, unless we’re in the consumer market, we often don’t spend as much time on packaging because we don’t always realize how powerful it can be.  Yet packaging is really the voice of your product or service that reaches out and speaks to your audience when you are not there.

In what ways can you use your packaging as the factor that makes your customer choose you?