Marketing Strategy and SWOT Analysis of Colgate

Attractive appearance and health are closely connected with oral hygiene. People can eat and drink whatever they want if they have healthy and strong teeth. When thinking about products used for maintaining oral hygiene Colgate is probably one of the first names popping up in your mind. It is among the most influential and popular brands producing products for oral hygiene. The brand produces a variety of products including mouthwash, toothpaste, toothbrushes, etc. Colgate is remarkably experienced and successful. There are various reasons behind the prosperity and growth of the brand. Let’s discuss the marketing strategies and SWOT analysis of Colgate to understand the reasons behind the success of this brand.

Let’s start the discussion of Colgate with the mission and vision statements of the company.

Mission Statement

“Sparking optimism in everyone, every day”

The mission statement of Colgate may seem somewhat unusual for a brand producing oral hygiene products. Many things in our life can be directly connected with the well-being and health of our teeth. People can’t enjoy various types of food and drinks if they have itching teeth. This situation makes people unhappy and unable to enjoy everyday life. At the same time, nice and healthy teeth are important for an attractive smile and self-confidence. Thus as an irreplaceable part of oral hygiene care, Colgate wants to create effective products that will be suitable for people with different concerns and will make people’s lives better.

Vision Statement

“Give everyone all the needed guidance to keep their smile healthy, thus eliminate many preventable and treatable oral health problems. That’s our vision, and to reach it we’re raising oral health standards with our product solutions and creating healthy habit-building learning opportunities that are easy to do.”

The vision statement of Colgate clearly shows that the focus of the brand is the well-being of the customers. Besides along with the present products, Colgate plans to come up with new solutions and effective products to decrease the concerns connected to oral hygiene problems and create easy ways for keeping teeth healthy. The brand is striving to become better while staying true to its initial values, promises, and plans.

Now, let’s have a look at the positioning strategy that Colgate implements.

 It will be much easier to understand the positioning strategy of the brand through analyzing the following Instagram post of Colgate.

This post picture is warm, attractive, and comforting to some extent. There is writing on the top of the picture which encourages the viewers to stress less and smile more. On the left side of the picture, the viewer will easily notice an emoji face, that transfers a feeling of relaxation and happiness.

Along with the writing on top, this emoji gives a positive, comforting, and caring association to the post and Colgate. Other details of the picture indicate that there is a collaboration or partnership with another company. When reading the caption of the post, it becomes clear that Colgate partners with Headspace to bring something special and useful to its customers.

The post and its caption speak about how much Colgate cares for the well-being of its customers by providing them additional benefits with their product. All the discussed details of the post picture and post description show that Colgate belongs to the Caregiver brand archetype.   

What does the Caregiver brand archetype stand for?

Desire: keeping people away from harm and protect them
Aim: help and support others
Strategy: make steps, do things and act for others

Next up, let’s go through the messaging levels of this archetype.

Level One: noticing and identifying someone in need 
Level Two: take care and nurture someone’s dependents
Level Three: find a balance between caring for others and caring for self
Level Four: caring for the rest of the world, being an altruist

Caregiver brand archetype will be a favorable and promising identity for your brand if it:

• strives to help people to take care of themselves
• is involved in services connected to education, healthcare, other field providing care.
• supports people to care about others and stay connected with them
• can consider customer service a way to ensure competitive advantage
• is a doing charitable and non-profit activities
• provides support and help to families
• is associated with nurturing

After identifying the archetype of Colgate, it’s time to go through the SWOT analysis of the brand.

Strengths

A leader in the market: The market for oral hygiene products is remarkably competitive. Despite this, Colgate is one of the leading names in the market. The products of the brand are extremely popular and renowned. Colgate is known for the high quality and effectiveness of its products and thus very often it is the first choice for many customers.

Strong distribution: As a part of Colgate-Palmolive company, Colgate has access to various distribution channels. This allows making the products of the brand more accessible and available for the customers. Colgate products are presented in various drugstore chains, supermarkets, pharmacies, and other types of stores.

Constant innovation: The parent company Colgate-Palmolive does heavy investments into the brands it owns. This refers to not only the marketing of the brands, the development process of products. Thanks to these investments, Colgate constantly creates new and effective products. The brand continuously introduces innovative products and keeps up with time and emerging trends.

Weaknesses

Market saturation: The market for oral hygiene products is often referred to as saturated. This market is quite competitive and is not providing new demand, unlike many other markets. The demand in this market is relatively stable and the only thing left to do for competing companies is striving to gain one another’s market share.

Commoditization of the brand name: As mentioned before, Colgate is a quite popular and renowned name in the market for oral hygiene products. This attribute of the brand may not always have a positive impact on Colgate.

The success of the company has led to a point where consumers started to commoditize its name. Often, many people may refer to other toothpaste brands like Colgate, thus leading to a decline in brand recognition.

Counterfeit: Today, many companies face the problem connected to counterfeits. More and more brands and products are copies and faked. Colgate is dealing with this problem as well. The fake versions of Colgate products are quite common. Many customers are unable to distinguish original products from counterfeits. The fake versions of Colgate products don’t display the same quality and result as the original ones. This damages the brand image of Colgate.

Opportunities

Product line expansion: It may seem like the product line of Colgate is extremely diverse and extensive. However, that’s not the case. Despite a wide variety of products made for addressing different concerns, there still much space for extensions and innovations. For this purpose, Colgate can use two strategies: product line filling and product line stretching. The expansion will lead to an increase in sales and the attraction of new customers.

Emerging markets: Unlike developed markets, emerging markets are growing at a comparably faster rate. These types of markets are full of opportunities for brands like Colgate. Using its strong distribution channels, the brand would successfully manage to ensure its active presence in such markets and find a new customer base and demand.

Threats

Competition: With time, new companies and brands will emerge in the market for oral hygiene products. This will make the present strong competition even more severe. As a result, it will be extremely hard for companies and in this market to come up with ideas, products, and other methods to differentiate themselves from others.

Brand Switches: Customers can find a huge number of products for the same purpose in the market nowadays. This refers to the products for oral hygiene care as well. The number of available substitutes creates a situation where people don’t stick to a certain brand. They rather choose to switch between brands and choose something different every time.

Moving on, let’s discuss the segmentation strategy of Colgate.

The discussion and analysis of the following commercial by the brand will help to identify the target segment chosen by Colgate.

The commercial evokes positive and heart-warming feelings. It is truly something unique, inspiring, and different. The plot of the video is developing around three characters who are quite different from each other.

Each of them had various difficulties and problems in life and was able to conquer them. All three have a story worth sharing. The challenges that they could overcome connect the stories of these three.

At the same time, they all seem friendly, nice, positive, and calm. The video clearly shows how dear and important is the family in the lives of these characters. They have a strong and loving bond with their close ones. All three carry morals and values and can face and conquer difficulties with a smile on a face and a hope for the best.

These characters collectively represent the target segment that Colgate wants to attract. After discussing all the details of the video and the characteristics of the characters, it becomes obvious that Colgate focuses on targeting the Traditionalists’ segment.

Who are Traditionalists?

Lifestyle and values: 

People belonging to this target segment tend to prioritize their family and put it in the first place. They are typically in their middle-ages and are married. Traditionalists strive to maintain stability, protection, and strength for their families. The upbringing of children is extremely important for them and they treat children with a lot of care and attention.

Representatives of this segment work hard to able to afford quality and good education for children. They do everything to bring up new generations with discipline, morals, and values. Also, Traditionalists give importance to a good career and are remarkably dedicated and honest in work.

Shopping preferences: 

When shopping, Traditionalists have a practical taste. They give preference to items that are comfortable rather than stylish. In general, they enjoy spending money and doing shopping. These people are usually bargain hunters.

Despite this, they can splurge on expensive brands and products that have remarkably good quality.

Traditionalists always choose quality over quantity when making a purchase decision. Besides, people from this segment are easily driven to new brands and products and thus aren’t brand loyal.

Other interesting facts about Traditionalists:

• Don’t like attending entertainment places.
• Enjoy spending calm and relaxing evenings at home with family.
• Consider new technologies and changes challenging and hard to adapt to.
• Tv is the main source of information for them. They watch it all the time and consider it the main source to obtain information.

Summing up, Colgate is undoubtedly one of the most influential and popular brands when it comes to oral hygiene products. The experience of the brand and the quality of its products ensure its secure place in a such competitive market.

Colgate successfully implements carefully chosen strategies which come up to be remarkably effective. With the care, improvement, and sustainability as the core values of Colgate, the company utterly understands what it takes to be a leading and demanded name in the market among the competitors. That’s all for the Marketing strategies and SWOT analysis of Colgate. For more blog posts like this, visit our main page.