How a Toothbrush Sells a Dentist Visit

Published 2023-03-21 · Updated 2026-06-29 · By Alan Wizemann

Topics: Digital Marketing, Healthcare Tech, AI & Machine Learning, Subscription

The marketing problem at quip was not the one I expected to spend my time on. We had a very large base of people who had subscribed to a toothbrush and a refill plan, which is about as low-stakes a relationship as a person can have with a brand, and the question in front of us was how you move that audience toward something far heavier, real professional dental care, without leaning on the two levers that the entire category seems to reach for by reflex. Those two levers are fear and urgency, and the whole category seems to default to them. Most of healthcare marketing, when you actually look at it, runs on some version of "here is what is wrong with you and here is why you should panic about it today." I understood early on that we could not build what we wanted on top of that foundation, because the relationship we had was not one that fear belonged in.

It helps to say plainly what quip had become, because the toothbrush was never the destination. The company had expanded into teledentistry, which meant opening that member base to a network of dentists who could do a remote assessment, backed by insurance, so that the daily brushing relationship could carry someone all the way through to actual care. That is a large leap, and asking a person who signed up for a brush to now trust you with a clinical conversation about their teeth is a different order of trust entirely, the kind you do not get to by shouting.

The engine that made the leap possible was a product called SmileMate, and the way it worked is the whole argument of this piece. A member takes a few photos of their own mouth, and the AI turns those photos into a structured oral-health assessment across the things that actually matter (alignment, gum health, tooth health), and then it generates something I still think is the most honest pitch I have ever been part of, which is an AI-rendered before-and-after of that person's own smile. You are not shown a stock model with perfect teeth – you are shown you, and then you are shown the version of you that good care could produce.

I want to sit with why that before-and-after is not a gimmick, because it would be easy to dismiss it as one. A gimmick manipulates; it points at a problem and inflates it until you act out of discomfort. The simulation does the opposite. It does not enlarge the present in order to frighten you, it shows you a future in order to invite you, and that is a genuinely different posture to take toward a person you are asking to spend money and attention on their health. The before-and-after powers a consumer-friendly conversation about treatment because it lets someone see their own potential outcome rather than recoil from their current one. Hope, it turns out, is a far more durable motivator than anxiety, and it does not leave the same residue.

But none of that pitch lands if you have not earned the right to make it, and this is the part that I think gets missed when people look at a company like quip from the outside and see only the clever AI at the end. The brush did the quiet, unglamorous work for years before SmileMate ever showed a single person their future smile. Every day, someone picked up that toothbrush, and every day quip learned a little more about them through their brushing data and the Habit Score that summarized it. What was really being built in all that ordinary repetition was a relationship and, just as importantly, a reason to trust. You do not hand the keys to your teeth to a brand you bought once. You hand them to one that has shown up in your bathroom every morning for a year and never once tried to scare you.

So the sequence is the whole point, and I have come to think it is the sequence that most marketing gets backwards. We tend to treat the big, high-stakes offer as the thing that needs the cleverest campaign, the sharpest urgency, the most persuasive copy, when in truth the work that makes the big offer possible happened much earlier and much smaller. The toothbrush sells the dentist visit, but not in the way that phrase first sounds. It does not sell it through a clever upsell or a well-timed promotion. It sells it by being reliable and present and useful long enough that, when the moment comes to ask for something real, the person on the other end already believes you mean well, because the small thing already proved that you do.

That is the lesson I keep returning to, and it is not really about teeth or toothbrushes at all. Marketing the next, bigger thing is mostly about what the smaller thing already demonstrated, the trust it banked, the habit it built, the proof it quietly accumulated while nobody was treating it as the main event. You do not market care with anxiety; you market it by letting someone see their own better outcome, and you only get to have that conversation, the higher-stakes one that actually matters, because the humble daily product earned the right to it first. The clever AI at the end was never the thing that closed the gap – the brush was.