Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

It does feel great to be writing this after being away for three weeks. Though my colleague Aayush more than made up for my absence with his sharp takes on the rise of vending machines in India and the futility of the government’s ban on loose cigarettes.

My last piece on Trade Tricks was about Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and the centrality of detergents to its phenomenal performance over the past decade.

Well, this edition is about its global rival Colgate-Palmolive, and the future of a product it’s synonymous with—toothpaste. And it has a lot to do with how many of our compatriots don’t brush their teeth every day.

Colgate needs them to change this habit to grow its business further. And one crucial way of doing that is by convincing children, especially those in rural areas, of the necessity of brushing daily.

But more importantly, with toothpaste.

And most importantly, with Colgate.

Catch ’em young!

Colgate is pretty much synonymous with toothpaste in India. It controls half the market, both by volume and value. Its nearest competitor, HUL, is just a third of Colgate’s size in this category.

So, if you are a toothpaste user, chances are you’re a Colgate consumer. And Colgate almost certainly wants you to buy more expensive toothpastes to up its revenue-per-household metric.

That’s the premiumisation every FMCG company is after. And in some categories, that’s the only way forward.

Take soaps. Around 99% of Indian households use soap, so there are very few new customers to tap. Which means you have to get the existing ones to switch to pricier soaps.

But that’s not quite the story in toothpaste. While lack of penetration is not the problem, just one in every five urban households brushes twice a day, according to a presentation Colgate-Palmolive made to analysts last week. What’s worse is that every second rural household doesn’t brush daily. Rural households only brush two to three times a week, compared to five times for the country as a whole.

And worryingly for toothpaste—and toothbrush—makers, a lot of them still rely on datoon, or twigs traditionally used as an oral-hygiene tool.

This is what Prabha Narasimhan, who moved from HUL to take over as managing director of Colgate-Palmolive India in September, told analysts on a recent analyst call: