Competitor analysis: They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but only brushing twice a day

keeps the dentist away. And that is the reason why the toothpaste industry in India is a 750 crore market. The giants of the industry are Oral-B, Colgate, Pepsodent and Close-Up. Brands like Sensodyne, Dabur (Meswak, Promise, Dabur Red) or Vicco also have a considerable market share that of course cant be ignored, but their social media presence is almost invisible and can be described as rudimentary at best. Competition in Indias toothpaste market has been heating up in the recent years. Procter & Gamble recently entered the market with the launch of Oral-B Pro-Health, a specially formulated toothpaste for Indians that contains a patented ingredient. Meanwhile, Unilever has been taking on the market leader Colgate by airing comparative advertisements on Indian television, claiming that its Pepsodent Germicheck toothpaste is 130% better than Colgate. Although Colgate-Palmolive has already taken Unilever twice to court, its plea to restrain the latter from resorting to comparative advertising has been declined both times as the court didnt believe that the ad denigrates Colgates toothpaste. Dabur India Ltd. (DABUR), the household goods maker controlled by the billionaire Burman family, is the latest and recently repositioned brand that would be competing with ColgatePalmolive Co. selling toothpaste for sensitive teeth as it offers more expensive products to reverse a slide in margins. The 128-year-old company is developing the new toothpaste and plans to start sales before March 2014. The Unmetric score is the first ever sector aware social media benchmark scores that blends qualitative and quantitative metrics to rank a brand against its competitors. Colgate, with their ongoing promotions of their Visible White toothpaste, tops the chart with the highest score of 38 for the period 15th May 2013-15th July 2013.

Back to the morning routine, the thing most of us do after brushing your teeth is probably checking your mail and checking Facebook. These brands have obviously used this insight to their advantage. Facebook is the primary social media playground of all brands and performing well here seems to come naturally to them. Analysis of major toothpaste brands in various Social media Back to the morning routine, the thing most of us do after brushing your teeth is probably checking your mail and checking Facebook. These brands have obviously used this insight to their advantage. Facebook is the primary social media playground of all brands and performing well here seems to come naturally to them.

Competition in terms of numbers, fans and targeted customers:

In terms of fan numbers and fan growth, Colgate is way ahead of the rest. Its interesting to note that while the fans of all these brands are predominantly male, Pepsodent alone has a perfect 50:50 ratio. Even in terms of age, a major part of the fans of Pepsodent are middle aged and even a small percentage of their fans are over 60, whereas 95% of the fans of all other brands are below 30 years of age. Colgate is completely overthrown by Oral-B when it comes to Twitter. In fact Colgate doesnt even have a unified Twitter handle, its presence on Twitter is split by their MaxFresh handle and Plax Mouthwash handle. Not only does Oral-B have the most followers, theyve also grown by almost 60%. While the Twitter handle of Pepsodent gathers cyber dust and the sparsely used Colgate and Close-Up stay stagnant with stunted growth, Oral-B has been tweeting over 9 times a day with over 580 tweets in a period of 2 months. Their success on Twitter is probably owed to the promotion of their recently launched Pro health toothpaste.

The stats change again when it comes to YouTube. The medium is rather under used and it is the TVCs that are mainly uploaded to the channels. Brand ambassador news is the other common kind of video upload. Sadly, Close Up doesnt have a YouTube channel. Colgate has the most views followed by Pepsodent while Oral-B has the most Subscribers.

Colgate has the most number of videos and was also the one to add the most new videos in the time period analyzed. A good number of the videos uploaded are user stories. Competition environment around the Sensodyne: Sensitivity is not a disease, and is a common dental problem that develops due to receding gums, vigorous tooth brushing and grinding, according to GlaxoSmithKline Plcs website. Glaxo sells a toothpaste for sensitive teeth under its Sensodyne brand, and the British company has a 1.1 percent share of the Indian market. Indias urban consumers are upgrading to dental creams that soothe sensitive teeth and have whitening properties. Brand Ambassadors: Colgate managed to engage the best with its fans followed by Close-Up. All brands use a good number of engagement oriented posts; other than that Colgate posts a lot around Sonam Kapoor (their current brand ambassador for the Visible White toothpaste), Close-up weaves in a lot of Bollywood in to their content, Pepsodent uses their Tales We Tell Our Kids cartoon series and other such child targeted content (probably to catch the attention of the parents whove liked the page given the relatively older demographic that likes the brand), and Oral- B has created exclusive content to promote their Twitter Hashtags, in-house dentists and general oral care. Overall conclusions based on the structure of Social media marketing, the approach of Customer connect and analysis of the same for Colgate as against its competitors:

To sum it all up Colgate seems to be mastering both major spaces of media by gaining maximum attention from users of Facebook and YouTube while Oral-B has taken custody over Twitter. In spite of the similarity in their products and the highly clogged market segment, these brands have succeeded in positioning themselves uniquely, with Colgate being the lead brand