What Toothpaste Can Teach Us About Promoting Community Services
In charities and public services we're often helping with challenges in life that can affect people in all walks of life.
So we want to be open to all, and serve our community equally.
Often the common approach is to make the service as universal as possible, and get our promotion out as widely as possible.
The idea of segmenting our audience, doing targeted advertising, and tailoring our service and our promotion for specific groups can feel uncomfortable - maybe unfair, somehow?
But in margareting, we don’t leave anyone out. Finding ways to divide our audience into meaningful groups around their specific needs and preferences could help us move away from a ‘universal’ approach, and offer a range of support that’s accessible, inclusive, a better fit for people’s needs, and make it easier for them to find us.
And to explain why, let's talk about toothpaste.
Let's talk about toothpaste
Picture the toothpaste aisle at wherever you do your big shop. The big supermarkets usually have literally an entire aisle of toothpaste don't they? There's more different kinds of toothpaste than kinds of bread sometimes.
But did you know they all have the same active ingredient?*
Flouride does all the things that make teeth nice and strong like Digby’s
There's only 1 ingredient in all those tubes of toothpaste that’s proven to work. Just 1 thing that legally allows them to claim all the various effects they put on the box - whitening, gum care, enamel care, cavity prevention…. All of that is achieved by Flouride.
So the 50p own brand tube of toothpaste is exactly as effective at doing all those things as the £4.50 fancy tube with stripes and whatnot.
But even knowing that, I bet you'll still choose your usual toothpaste next time you go shopping.
Why?
Because it’s not just straightforward utility that’s important to us.
We’ll also look for things like:
Flavour
Consistency
Allergies
Ethical considerations like having eco-friendly packaging or vegan ingredients
How easy the tube is to squeeze
And then things we don't necessarily weigh up consciously like familiarity and habit. Maybe you're one of those people who don't think about it too much and just pick up the one your family's always used.
But also trust.
When straightforward utility is the most important thing - if we're concerned about our gums, worried about cavities or keen to keep away stains - we might be a bit wary of something too cheap, or an unknown brand. We'll want to trust that the toothpaste we buy is going to reliably do what we need.
And that's why when you walk down the toothpaste aisle you'll see so many options, even from the same brand, highlighting one specific feature.
Brands will create several versions of basically the same toothpaste, highlighting different effects because it's understandable we’re more likely to trust the tube that says it's specifically tailored for gum care over the one that says it does everything including gum care.
What's this got to do with community services?
It’s fun to spend ages in the treats aisle deciding what to choose, but not things like toothpaste, or community services.
Because it's important to remember we're increasingly used to having choice about even the most ordinary products and services we use in our everyday lives. And we're used to being told clearly what we can expect them to do for us.
Whatever's important to us in a toothpaste, we're used to being able to quickly spot it amongst the vast array of similar options. We’re not spending hours in the toothpaste aisle reading all the packaging to figure out which one works best.
Despite what could easily be a bewildering array of options, targeted marketing means we usually find it pretty easy to spot the particular option that's right for us.
And isn't that exactly what we want for our service users? That in the often bewildering world of health, care and community services people can easily spot that our service is the one offering the help they need.
What’s your flouride?
Taking a lesson from toothpaste we can start by thinking of the help we offer in our service as the "flouride". Just like the flouride in toothpaste helps with gum health, cavity protection, fresh breath, whitening - our service will probably help people in a range of different ways.
What’s your flouride, and what are the different benefits people are looking for from it?
Once you've grouped your community by those needs, you can get to know each group, find out who they are, how to be there where they look for support, help them feel confident to choose you, and make sure your service is accessible and meets their needs.
How to go about doing all that is a whole other collection of posts, but I hope this has at least got you thinking about targeting in a different way, and the value of moving away from a 'universal' approach.
*To the best of my non-dentist knowledge. From what I understand there are a couple of ingredients that add a power-up in specific effects like sensitivity, but mostly flouride is the star of the show.
