Philips Brush Button

Background

Everyone is supposed to brush their teeth for two full minutes, twice a day.

Even when people knew that, they often did not bother or they struggled to calculate the two minutes in the belief they were doing fine with their oral health regimes.

Philips, which makes electric toothbrushes and whose mantra is to deliver innovation that improves lives, found out that 80% of people don't brush for two minutes.

Idea

Agency ACHTUNG! mcgarrybowen, which had already gamified tooth-brushing in 2014 with an app for children, set out not to create a campaign about better brushing. Instead they set out to make the two minutes spent brushing valuable time for Philips customers.

Rather than creating an app, which would have required people to bring their phones into the bathroom, they created a 'brushing assistant'.

This took the form of a Brush Button, attached to the mirror, and which provided consumers with a realtime two-minute customised update on subjects such as the news, weather, personal calendar, music, stock prices, commute news and so on.

It could also tell when the brush heads needed replacing or remind the user about dentist appointments if sync'd with their calendar.

Consumers connected only once to the Brush Button, at which point they picked their two-minute topics.

ACHTUNG! mcgarrybowen developed the prototype together with Google and even built a test bathroom so as to replicate real-life brushing habits in order to identify how to change them.

Results

Too early to say as the Brush Button is still out with a test group but early feedback says they're aware of their brushing behaviour, finding it less boring and brushing more frequently for the full two minutes.

Our Thoughts

Of course I checked my brushing behaviour and...guess what...I'm a failure: estimating two minutes is hard, and it feels like a long time.

The Brush Button is a fascinating example of the way connected devices allows manufacturers of the humble toothbrush to go: adding personalisation and service to the offer.

Sure, for the consumer, the Brush Button is a useful, helpful device – but its real value is in the way it transforms Philips' relationship with them: in the consumer's mind, Philips becomes associated with oral health, and utility or entertainment too.

I suspect the Brush Button will have other benefits too for Philips: one, a possible price premium; two, it locks consumers into the Philips eco-system; and three – simple really – if we all brush our teeth for longer, we'll have to buy more of those expensive replacement brush-heads.

It can't be too long, surely, before Philips sticks a chip in the brush itself that connects to the Brush Button, at which point even more possibilities open up.