A toothpaste box that recites its formula

Picture a toothpaste box that tells you only the truth.

Sodium fluoride, so many parts per million. Hydrated silica. Sorbitol. A flavouring agent. All accurate, all printed in neat type on the front, and nobody in a Mohandessin supermarket has ever reached for a box because of it.

Some people would call that the honest version and everything else a trick. I think they have it backwards. Marketing that grabs at people and takes their attention without giving anything back deserves a different name. But reciting the facts and stepping away is not the honest alternative. It is simply a way of not showing up.

People do not choose toothpaste by chemistry. A teenager wants to feel sure of himself when he stands close to someone. A mother wants a bedtime that ends without a fight. A man in his sixties wants the dentist to stop frowning. The story on the pack, the colour, the taste, the small promise of how the morning will feel, is part of what the product does for them. Much of what we buy works partly because we believe it will, and a brand that tells a useful story is serving that belief rather than exploiting it.

Doing this well asks for two things that facts do not. The nerve to picture the shopper's morning instead of the laboratory's report, and to speak to her in her words rather than ours. And the willingness to make a promise and keep it, again and again, getting it wrong sometimes on the way to getting it useful.

The temptation is always to design the box we would pick up ourselves. The work is to design the one she would.