Quip Tasks Creative AOR Mother LA With Building Its Brand

When Romain Naegelen, the managing director and partner at Mother LA, thinks about commercials for oral care brands, dentists in white lab coats comes to mind. After all, toothbrush and toothpaste brands historically shoved the idea of "four out of five dentists" recommending a product down the cavity-filled mouths of consumers for years. But Naegelen and Quip CMO Lisa Swift see an opportunity not to tout consumers needing sparkling white perfection, but how they need steady improvement in their oral care. Quip, the DTC toothbrush brand that has expanded its product offerings to include floss, toothpaste, mouthwash, an app and subscription plan, is looking to become an oral care brand that sits firmly within someone's healthy lifestyle. And to do that, Swift said Quip needs to think how its hardware, subscriptions and software fit into the broader healthcare space. Quip looked for an agency that could do both strategy and creative under short timelines and without huge budgets. After talking with a few agencies, Swift found that in Mother LA, which delivered an understanding of the brand in just a few weeks. "We chose them to help us develop this brand narrative that would be grounded in the strategic implications of where our roadmap was going, while looking at brand awareness, who we are as a brand and what space is ownable for us," Swift said. The scope of the work for Mother LA as Quip's creative agency of record includes creating a campaign this summer and a more significant push for the holiday season. COMvergence reports that Quip spends $4 million per year in U.S. offline media. Progress, not perfection Quip views marketing oral care differently than what's historically done in the space. Quip knows few consumers are striving for perfection with their smile, but progress is at the center of Quip's brand. "A lot of people know what the right thing to do is and they just don't do it," Swift said, which is why Quip thinks, with its array of products and app, it can be the solution for consumers who want to get incrementally better at taking care of their mouth. The latest step in Quip's progression as a company came last month when it acquired Toothpic, a teledentistry company. "That helps us get one step farther into that that overall journey directly with consumers, but also with the professional network," Swift said. To reach consumers, Naegelen said Quip and Mother will take an approach not often seen in the category. "Quip really disrupted the category through innovation and design, but it doesn't really necessarily mean that we have to take ourselves too seriously," Naegelen said, hinting that the upcoming campaign will be in grounded in humor. The Quip customer of the future Quip has historically targeted millennials, with some outreach to Gen Z, but with the new campaign, the messaging will target all generations. Swift said the goal is to reach consumers living a specific lifestyle and that spans all generations, targeting "people who find themselves more design-forward, who do care about oral care and want to show progress." The digital work will be targeted at specific segments of consumers after Quip completes a segmentation study. Mother's research for the brand answers why consumers don't take care of their teeth perhaps as well as they should. They expect to find commonalities across multiple generations, and those findings will drive the creative. Quip plans to start testing creative in certain markets this summer, and use those insights to fuel its media planning for the winter campaign, which will be the bigger of the two campaigns this year. Ultimately the goal is twofold—Naegelen recognizes it can't just be about building the brand; they've got to move product as well. So Quip is tasking Mother with developing the right creative that pushes Quip to forefront of consumers' minds when thinking about their oral health, but also reinforces the extensive product line. "Through the humanizing oral care strategy, you're going to get a better feel for what we're about as a brand, but the strategy needs to come down to the product," Naegelen said. A year from now, Swift said success doesn't just look like stronger brand awareness for Quip, but also how the brand can measure its impact on how well customers are taking care of their teeth. "The big nuts we have to crack with digital and with teledentistry in a future state really ... depends on consumers willingness to trust us and to engage in this new type of dentistry," Swift said.

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Quip Wants to Sell More Than Just Toothbrushes, so It Hired Mother LA to Build Its Brand

The company is positioning itself as a new kind of oral healthcare brand

Jameson Fleming

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Jameson Fleming