Three Weeks to Innovate the Oral Care Market
Three weeks to work on their projects and an intense competition to identify the best solutions for developing the oral health category on Esselunga's e-commerce site and to foster integration between online retail and the activities of points of sale for the Colgate-Palmolive brand. This was the challenge faced by the students in the course of Distribution Marketing held by Sandro Castaldo, Katia Premazzi and Aulona Ulqinaku. "With their projects, the students tried to understand what it means to develop a partnership between industry and distribution, applying some of the tools and competences they have learned during the course," explains Professor Castaldo. "The active presence of Colgate-Palmolive and Esselunga managers made the competition intense and engaging, enriching it with interesting ideas for students". Two winning teams were identified: one who worked on the aspect of innovation, the other on the omnichannel strategy, which has the mission of integrating marketing channels and harmonizing store and e-commerce services to create a complete and personalized shopping experience.
The winning group's proposals in the innovation category focused on the Instagram channel and its influencers, on the creation of a virtual store and on guerrilla marketing techniques - i.e. strategies that rely on unconventional, high-impact communication techniques. "In the latter case, we proposed the installation in a central and busy area, of a huge toothpaste and of an interactive screen," explains Anita Fava, a Business Economics and Management student. "As people get close to the screen, they see appearing the question 'how white is your smile?'. They are then invited to take a picture of themselves and the screen immediately shows it in its original version along with a bleached smile version. All this with the final aim of arousing the association white smile/Colgate".
"With our project we have tried to create strong synergy between the e-commerce channel and the traditional one", says Giovanni Minucci, Business Economics and Management student, who worked in the team who came first for the omnichannel category. "One of our proposals was to create a game, 'clean the tooth', to encourage children to brush their teeth regularly: at certain times, on the smartphone of one of the parents, comes a notification showing the image of a dirty tooth, so the child knows it's time for brushing, and once finished, with a touch on the image they can see the dirty tooth becoming white and clean," he continues. "What was truly stimulating about this experience was the short deadline: the fact of having such a short time to develop our projects made us feel catapulted into a challenging and concrete company reality".