Chocolate Toothpaste and Search
January 25, 2014
The ArnoldIT Overflight snagged this headline on January 16, 2014: ‘Chocolate Toothpaste’ Prevents Tooth Decay. Unusual news can be entertaining. Then on January 24, 2014, I spotted this headline: P&G’s Chocolate Toothpaste: Innovation or Desperation? The source of this story was not a secondary information source. The Innovation or Desperation item appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.
Here’s the quote to note:
The line, which P&G (PG) promises to start selling soon, comprises three flavors: “Mint Chocolate Trek,” “Lime Spearmint Zest,” and “Vanilla Mint Spark.” Here’s how the Crest marketing team describes the new paste: “It’s a whole new world of deliciousness for toothbrushes everywhere.”
The hook for me was not “chocolate toothpaste prevents tooth decay.” This assertion reminds me of marketers who assert that a particular search system delivers value or understands human discourse. The problem is that the association of “chocolate AND tooth decay” is easier for me to grasp than “chocolate PREVENTS tooth decay.”
With search, value is difficult to connect to search. Search costs money, generates more work because documents have to be opened and read, or creates a willingness among busy users to assume that a search result is a correct result.
The Businessweek story connects “innovation” and “desperation.” Marketers have hit upon a product innovation that will make some influencers go for the chocolate toothpaste.
Search and content processing vendors have been following this path for many years. Not only is the uptake of new jargon standard operating procedure for search vendors, the consultants and experts working in search are turbochargers of constant exploration of ways to make search have sizzle. Search is analytics, taxonomy, knowledge, Big Data, etc.
I recall that in one of my university’s required classes, one professor insisted that ancient people cleaned their teeth with twigs. I also know that search methods from the years before “smart software” worked as well.
Progress in search and retrieval, like the chocolate toothpaste innovation, are not “innovation and desperation.” The juxtaposition of attributes is another indicator that the disconnect between expectations and reality is a characteristic of business today.
Will chocolate toothpaste work better than “regular” toothpaste? Will the new search system work better than “regular” search systems? Under specific test conditions, it is possible to “prove” efficacy. But in the real world, toothpaste like search has a baseline of performance. Wordsmithing, odd juxtapositions, and cleverness cannot be confused with Daliesque novelty.
Stephen E Arnold, January 25, 2014
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