In a crowded oral care market dominated by traditional players, TheraBreath, a Church & Dwight brand, stood out with its clinically proven formula that eliminates bad breath at its source rather than just masking it. While TheraBreath had built a loyal following since its founding in 1994, the brand faced a new challenge: how to scale their marketing strategy to reflect the way modern consumers shop and engage with brands.

The Church & Dwight Canada team, looking to maximize TheraBreath’s potential, recognized that today’s customers don’t follow linear paths to purchase – they zigzag between discovery, research, and decision-making across multiple touchpoints and channels. To deliver on multiple objectives – from introducing its unique story to driving both online and in-store sales – TheraBreath needed a comprehensive solution that went beyond simple conversion tactics.

Partnering with agency Wavemaker Canada, Church & Dwight turned to Amazon Ads to launch an innovative “Couch to Cart” campaign that accompanied customers as they moved from passive viewing to active purchasing. Rather than separating awareness, consideration, and purchase into siloed efforts, they created an integrated campaign that moved customers naturally through each stage of their journey.

The campaign began with upper-funnel tactics – most notably Prime Video and Online Video – to tell TheraBreath’s story in ways that were engaging, emotional, and memorable. Using Amazon Marketing Cloud, a clean room solution that enables privacy-safe analytics, the brand could understand how audiences interacted with content, which messages resonated, and where potential buyers were falling off. These insights allowed them to reengage video viewers with lower-funnel tools like Sponsored Display ads and optimized product detail pages.

“Brand stories are difficult to tackle in maybe more traditional means because of short attention spans and the ability to break through against other brands,” adds Church & Dwight’s head of marketing, Michael Ng. “What the full funnel approach allows you to do,” he says, “is lengthen that across the Couch to Cart journey and reach consumers multiple times, but in a way where they’re not rejecting the message, they’re accepting it.”

The results of this innovative approach were impressive, demonstrating the power of a full-funnel strategy for an established brand seeking to scale in a competitive market. The brand saw a 30% lift in brand awareness a 50% rise in customer count and a 44% increase in dollar sales. Key performance indicators – like household penetration, click-through rates and video completion rates – also saw year-over-year growth. Just as importantly, those metrics translated into real-world impact, with not just a lift in e-commerce sales on Amazon but a corresponding boost in brick-and-mortar performance as well. 

“The Couch to Cart strategy reaches customers differently,” says Ng, “making it as easy as possible for anyone who’s seen and engaged in our brand to go and buy our brand – either online or offline. Couch to Cart is impactful [because it’s] using the insights to make sure tactics are working in unison with each other and not against each other.” 

Internal champions within Church & Dwight helped drive the shift, he explains, and close collaboration with Amazon Ads ensured the Church & Dwight team had the guidance and technical support to make the most of Amazon Ads solutions. Ng’s advice: Be open to new ideas. Simplify rather than complicate. And make sure you have an internal champion who can push this thinking forward.

In the end, what Church & Dwight and Wavemaker achieved wasn’t just a high-performing campaign for TheraBreath. It was a blueprint for how to build a brand in the modern commerce landscape, one in which content and commerce, storytelling and insights, awareness and conversion all come together in a single, responsive system. 

The success of this full-funnel strategy aligns with key themes discussed at Amazon’s recent Upfront event which took place in Toronto last month, where the importance of full funnel advertising was a central focus.

Visit the Amazon Ads website to learn more about full-funnel advertising.