“Dad, look! Μy tooth is about to fall. The Tooth Fairy is visiting my bed tonight”, said my 7-year-old son the other day.
“Son, ever wondered what the Tooth Fairy does, with all the teeth she collects?”, I replied.
“She must be making furniture”, he said.
“Still, what does she do with all this furniture she makes? They must be thousands!”, I kept pushing the discussion.
“She must be selling them to make money”, he replied.
And then, the plot started to thicken. While we naively believe that the Tooth Fairy is soothing the pain of our kids losing their teeth, do we ever wonder whether there is a hidden conspiracy behind?
The conspiracy theory
It might come as a shock to you, but… have you ever thought that the Tooth Fairy might have actually established a big mega corp of a multi-million dollar business? An underground network that sustains her “innocent” operations, treating our kids as her clients?
I mean come-on! Where does the Tooth Fairy find all this money? Generating money from her magic wand (to replace the teeth she takes under the pillow), would cause economy inflation! She must be playing by the rules of the global economy and the big banks, the masters of this world. Even better, she could be operating in crypto, to keep herself and her operations anonymous. Maybe she even invented Bitcoin, for crying out loud!
Trust my word, the Tooth Fairy business is real. I’ve heard people talking it about it. “The Earth is flattened and the Tooth Fairy smartened”, they said. I believe them. And her business model is simple. For each dollar spent to collect the tooth, she is making 5x out of her investment. She is maintaining a positive cash-flow, to be able to buy the raw material (the teeth) without credit from her clients (the kids).
Collected teeth end up to the Tooth factory, where they are sterilized, processed and repackaged, feeding the dental industry or other markets, with us, never asking questions or wondering about the origins of the products we use. Surprise, now you know!
Having established the truth, let’s analyze the Tooth Fairy industry. We might learn some lessons after all.
Potential market size
Kids are the Tooth Fairy customers. With around 140 million kids born every year, the potential market size is at least a half a billion-dollar business, probably more.
But, the Tooth Fairy lore, is mainly established on Western countries, where the birth rate is around 4-8million per year. This reduces the tappable market to around 3-5%, but it creates a tremendous growth opportunity. The Tooth Fairy can penetrate the market of other countries at a global scale, and establish her business by adapting to the history, the tradition, and the peculiarities of these different cultures.
Something similar is happening to Greece. In the last few years, we have seen “Black Friday” and “Halloween” or other similar trends originating from the US, slowly penetrating the Greek way of living. And a monetization model ramping up around it. For the record, Greeks have been mocking about these things, but, year after year, it is slow starting to become a “thing”.
Marketing Ops
Although the Tooth Fairy customers are kids, the real decision makers are their parents. If the parents are not convinced to tell the story, the Tooth Fairy stands no chance to visit a kid's pillow and get her precious payload.
The Tooth Fairy marketing team will need to make a set of serious investments and generate brand awareness. Convince parents and kids she is a story worth talking about.
This can happen by publishing books or creating movies around the topic. Or invest in native ads. The latter is really my favorite. Have you observed how brands invest in movies, for example that specific car appears in the movie, or that specific cellphone is used? This is native advertising and while you see that famous actor holding that phone, you want it too. Tooth Fairy can do the same. While in the movie, the Tooth Fairy story can kick-in for a few minutes, while the protagonist is putting her kid to bed.
Getting access to local markets is a challenge of its own. There are cases where the Tooth Fairy must rebrand herself, to make it more compelling to the culture of specific regions. Like the “little mouse” story, as it used in Spanish-speaking countries, or for example “Le Petite Souris” in France.
This approach is vital, to help the business grow by making a better connection with the people of the target market, but still, the end goal is the same.
