DenTek does more than sell merchandise
Being consistent is good, but you need to be consistently great to keep up with today’s New General Market, according to Dave Fox, president and CEO of DenTek Oral Care.
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A best practice at DenTek is to care, a concept that sounds so simple but in reality takes many moving pieces to master. “It starts at the top, and I’ve got to care more than anybody else. I’ve got to move faster than anybody else, and that’ll set the tone,” he explained. Caring also involves a deep dive into the community. “We monitor everything. All the posts, all the phone calls, all the letters. This is how you get a sense over time if you’re doing the right thing and how consumers talk to you and how involved they are with the brand. It really is about a relationship; it’s not just about selling to someone,” Fox said.
Fox said he is a fan of old-fashioned metrics even if the gauges are such new-world technologies as Facebook. He stays on top of how many Facebook likes the company gets, how many people opt into the email database, how many people open the emails and how many people view videos. “Because ultimately, people vote not just with their wallets, but with their eyes, with their pens, with their emails,” Fox said, noting that although it is still about sales and profits, there is value in a positive buzz.
Although DenTek exists in a mature category, the company is gaining traction with younger consumers through an acquisition made six months ago called Orabrush, a tool to scrape accumulation off of the tongue. The product has a following with 18 to 24 year olds, especially those dating and concerned with bad breath. “A fun fact: In 2010, 97% of all the paid search on YouTube was for one brand — Orabrush. They were the first brand to use YouTube for paid search — 45 million views —which is like a billion times more than any DenTek product cumulatively,” Fox recalled. “So we bought that business to really help us understand how consumers — people — use YouTube to become involved with products. And we’re now taking that learning and trying to apply that across other products within our product line.”
DenTek often turns to consumers to help design products. According to Fox, the company monitors social media and reviews every 800 call. “We try to read every review and everything that’s said about our products, and actually use that input. We humble ourselves and say, ‘How can we make our products better?’ And as a result, we probably upgrade every one of the 30 or 40 products in our line every 18 months. Because we can’t imagine what they’re going to say, what they’re thinking when we develop a product. We develop the best we can, we put it out there and we say, ‘You know what? We can make it better, and here’s why.’”
As a smaller company, DenTek also is a “challenger” brand. It doesn’t have the bountiful budgets of big competitors. The company now allocates a significant portion of its budget to social media. While that doesn’t negate TV, it is a tool to target the desired audience. Fox said it is crucial to find the right way and right place to talk to consumers. And that’s not always just millennials.
“Our business has always been about the psychographic; it’s never been about the demographic. It’s the highly involved oral care consumer, and that can be a 6 year old whose parents are active flossers and they start flossing when they’re very young. It could be the teenager who has braces or the person who comes back from the periodontist and realizes they’re going to lose their teeth if they don’t start using an interdental brush. But wherever they are, whatever life stage they’re at, that’s our consumer.”
The concept of authenticity so much discussed when marketing to the New General Market doesn’t stop with consumers, he added. Retailers also have the proverbial “BS” meter, too. “[Retailers] force us to be on our game,” he said.