- The minty flavour that they add to toothpaste is completely unnecessary and does nothing to help protect or clean your teeth.
They add the minty flavour to make you “feel” as though you teeth are nice and clean after you brush them, and of course, so that you’ll be more satisfied with their product and more likely to buy it again.
Any toothpaste company that decides not to add a minty flavour to their toothpaste will get less repeat customers and will therefore lose to their competitors. So now all major toothpaste brands use a minty flavour — because we expect it.
2. Toothpaste commercials mislead you into using more toothpaste than necessary.
If you look on the back of a tube of toothpaste it will recommend you to use a “pea-sized” amount. This is the amount of toothpaste you need to clean your teeth properly.
If you’re adding a full strip onto the brush as it’s shown in the commercial above, then you’ve been manipulated by advertising into using more.
Of course, if tens of millions of customers use more toothpaste than necessary, and have to buy more tubes of toothpaste, that translates into millions of dollars of profit for the toothpaste brand over time.
3. The “dentists” wearing white coats shown in toothpaste commercials aren’t actually dentists!
Toothpaste commercials commonly market themselves by claiming that their toothpaste is recommended by real dentists. They frequently have an actor on-screen, wearing a white coat, who gives the audience the illusion that an actual dentist is recommending their toothpaste.
Newsflash: They’re actors! Most real dentists probably aren’t particularly skilled on-camera, and may not necessarily look right for the commercial.
4. The way that toothpaste foams in your mouth is completely necessary. Toothpaste companies add foaming agents to their toothpaste so that you can visibly see the toothpaste spreading around your mouth.
Customers now expect their toothpastes to foam up and will feel as though their toothpaste is not working properly if it doesn’t. Of course, natural toothpastes (that haven’t had foaming agents added) clean your exactly the same as mainstream toothpastes, minus the necessary foaming.
5. They colour toothpaste with coloured stripes for no reason
They add coloured stripes to their toothpaste to give us the illusion that the toothpaste is helping with “more than one thing at the same time”.
Perhaps it’s fighting cavities while at the same time whitening your teeth. The multi-coloured stripes are designed to visually suggest to us that this “multi-action formula” is at work.
6. They sometimes add microbeads or granules to make us feel as though our teeth are getting a “deep clean”.
These microbeads or granules have a kind of gritty texture that makes us feel as though the teeth are getting properly, deeply cleaned. In fact, they have no effect on the effectiveness of a toothpaste and are added purely to create an emotional reaction of “cleanness” in you.
7. The white teeth you see in toothpaste commercials didn’t get way by using the product shown in the advert.
When you see perfectly white teeth in toothpaste commercials, you naturally assume (probably without thinking much about it) that the people in the commercial actually used the product they’re showing on their teeth. They didn’t!
First of all, whitening toothpaste could never make somebody’s teeth that white; only professional dentist treatments could achieve that level of whitening.
Instead, the actors/actresses in the commercial probably had their teeth artificially painted white quickly before the commercial began. Or today, they may just whiten them digitally using editing software during post-production.
You’ll never see toothpaste the same way again!
