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Marketing Case Study: ORAL-B

Marketing Case Study:

Oral-B is certified as the #1 dentist-recommended toothbrush brand worldwide. The brand owned by P&G has been offering in Turkey a variety of manual toothbrushes, electronic/rechargeable toothbrushes, replacement brush heads, kids toothbrushes, floss and mouthwashes to fit oral care needs. Every brush head has exclusive, dentist-designed features and it is compatible with all Oral-B brush handles.

1. Below items are listed in Oral-B product mix. Analyze the product mix of Oral-B offered in Turkey market by giving related explanation and necessary calculation on width, length and depth as product mix indicators.

2. The electronic toothbrush line includes products listed under Oral-B Vitality, Oral-B Pro, Oral-B Smart and Oral-B Genius and Kids. Focus on brand development and branding and explain which ways are adopted (a) to develop brands for the electronic toothbrush products and (b) which strategy is used in branding Oral-B’s products in this line?

3. Oral-B recently added its Oral-B toothpaste (see File 1) in order to be able to offer complete solution to the market and become as they call a “megabrand” (see File 2).

What can you call the product strategy that the company adopts by adding toothpaste to its product mix? Why? What are the advantages of this strategy to the company? Explain.

The toothpaste market is mainly segmented based on consumers’ sought benefits from the product: advanced health, multi-benefit, whitening, freshness. Oral-B clearly targets the advanced health segment with its basic products (File1). After a while, marketing team came up with the idea of extending the toothpaste line, especially based on capturing the consumers at the higher end of the market who also care about whiteness and freshness.

On the other hand, the parent company P&G has already been tapping these markets with its other brand İpana (File 3).

4. The marketing team prepared a report about the current state of IPANA product line. The report indicated that İpana is managed through 3 group of products entitled as Complete, 3DWhite, and Pro-Expert; the share of each group in total sales of the line is 50%, 40%, and 10% serving medium quality-medium price (Complete & 3DWhite) and high quality-high price markets (Pro-Expert), respectively. It is clear that İpana does not offer any item in the advanced health segment. The team believes that Oral-B, with its proficiency in innovation, would be successful by offering new items targeting premium and super premium segments, this time focusing on whitening and freshening attributes. Although Oral-B struggles with the market leader Sensodyn in the advanced health segment, the team sees important growth opportunity for the brand. So, the company introduced new products in its line of toothpaste (see File 4) based on the analysis of the marketing team.

• Evaluate the rationale of extending Oral-B toothpaste. What are the underlying factors of this decision? Explain.
• Is the company’s approach and analysis satisfactory? Why? Would you consider other inquiry? Justify your answer by giving explanations.

5. How could the company use product mix pricing strategies for Oral-B in building an effective price structure and reach profitability for the electronic toothbrushes? Offer at least 3 strategies and show their relevance by using appropriate explanations and examples.

 Oral-B is the only power brush in Turkey with rapidly growing business, increasing awareness among consumers, with superior technology and design and wide distribution across trade channels. The company has recently introduced a mobile app to enhance brushing experience and change attitudes towards brushing. The app uses advanced 3D Tracking to map out all areas and surfaces on your teeth up to 16 zones. Together with built-in AI Brushing Recognition Technology that has learned over 1000 human brushing behaviors they help guide you to your best clean and make sure you cover all areas. With every session, you get personalized instructions, tips and encouragement. The technology helps you are brushing even the hard-to-reach areas and the Pressure Sensor alerts you if you brush too hard. Here is a user comment:

“Realize a superior clean with the new revolutionized Oral-B mobile experience. Now on onto the app. Okay so the brush COMES with a thing to hook up to your mirror which is just genius because who wants to hold the phone while brushing? The app also tracks your progress during brushing and also shows a diagram showing where to brush. After you brush it shows you the results and that’s the best part. Getting my results makes brushing the highlight of my day. First time I got 54% (horrible). Second was 68% (better). Third was 99% (amazing). 4th was 100% or ? (perfect). Even my mom (who is a dentist) said my gums are very healthy and my teeth are shiny clean. Recommend this product times a million!”

Assume that the company requests your advice in below marketing issues to be able to increase and manage market penetration in electronic toothbrush market along with this mobile app.

6. What positioning would you offer to the company especially considering the mobile experience? State your points of parity and points of differences. Offer a brand mantra for Oral-B.

8. How would you define target audience for this new offering? What would be your marketing communications objective for the target audience? Why? Please justify your answer.
9. Which communication channels would you use in delivering your message to your target audience? Why?
10. By distributing the electronic toothbrushes at drugstores, pharmacies, big supermarkets, as well as online retailers, what kind of distribution system is the company engaging in? Why? Discuss major advantages and disadvantages of this distribution for the company.

10. What types of channel conflict may arise in this channel structuring? Offer ways to reduce possible channel conflict and increase the productivity of the distribution system.