Blogbytes: turning bad breath into medicine

Many years ago in America, Listerine had an antiseptic liquid for which it needed a mass-market use. So they invented bad breath, and with it mouthwash. And consequently they owned the market. No one noticed bad breath until Listerine sold it.

The more Listerine sold bad breath, the bigger their sales.

Subsequently, of course, other mouthwashes copied them. But they were all small sellers because Listerine dominated that market.

Any message about ‘cures bad breath’ would just increase the size of the overall market.

It wouldn’t change the market dynamics, which meant all the little brands were doing Listerine’s job for them.As long as they were just saying ‘cures bad breath’.

Then along came Scope. Scope was marketed by people who actually knew what they were doing. They didn’t want to just grow the market for Listerine’s benefit. They wanted to take market share away from Listerine, which meant they needed a market share message, instead of a market growth one.

They were not telling people why they should use mouthwash but telling Listerine users why they should switch. And they noticed Listerine had a weakness. It took away bad breath, but it left a slight antiseptic smell so that became the point at which Scope attacked Listerine.

Scope advertised its mouthwash as having ‘a fresh minty taste’. In the advertising they ridiculed Listerine users, shouting after them: ‘Hey, medicine breath.’ And the fear of bad breath was replaced by the fear of ‘medicine breath’.

Scope’s advertising took a lot of sales from Listerine until eventually, Listerine was forced to copy Scope and produce a better-tasting mouthwash.

Scope totally changed the dynamics of the market by understanding the difference between ‘market share’ and ‘market growth’.

Another case was Bayer. Aspirin was the most commonly used type of painkiller; and headache was by far the most common use of aspirin. So, since Bayer was the biggest brand of aspirin, and since aspirin owned the headache market, all Bayer had to do was to sell aspirin.

The more people bought aspirin, the more Bayer sales grew. There had been alternative painkillers, but all of them just sold themselves as headache cures. And aspirin owned the headache market so none of these painkillers changed the market dynamics.

Bayer grew and grew because the smaller brands were using a market growth message, instead of a market share one.

Tylenol didn’t do that. They saw that Bayer’s strength was also their weakness: they were inextricably linked to aspirin.

So Tylenol didn’t have to take on the Bayer brand, they just had to ‘educate’ people about aspirin. Their advertising didn’t have to mention Bayer by name. Their job wasn’t to talk about a headache cure, it was to talk people out of aspirin. Their advertising said ‘Did you know that excessive use of aspirin has been found to cause stomach irritation, and even bleeding in some people?’

And the answer was of course, if you didn’t want to take the risk, use Tylenol. Which millions of people did.

No one questioned the qualifying phrases ‘some people’ or ‘excessive use’. It didn’t matter, the seed of doubt was enough. Because Tylenol, like Scope, realised the only way to change things is to change things.

Dave Trott writes a monthly article on The Marketing Society’s blog at blog.

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