A three-letter name aimed at a crowded shelf.

Aim was a newcomer from the start. English Wikipedia’s list of toothpaste brands says the brand was introduced in 1973 by Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods group, and a 1988 Chicago Tribune column refers to its marketer as Lever. The product was a gel, and Church & Dwight, which bought the brand thirty years later, still described it in September 2003 as the gel of the pair it was acquiring, set beside Pepsodent, which it called a traditional toothpaste.

The launch arrived in a market with two established names. In a talk to the American Association of Advertising Agencies at its Eastern Annual Conference, published by WARC with the date 19 November 1974, Charles Fredericks, an executive vice president of Ogilvy & Mather in New York, explained how his agency had marketed a new toothpaste brand, Aim, in a market dominated by Crest and Colgate. WARC catalogues the talk among its classic speeches under the title “How Do You Tackle The Leaders?”.

The name is three letters, one syllable and a verb. The design palette for this guide takes its red from a product name: among the Aim gels whose ingredients Church & Dwight publishes on its corporate website is one the company itself calls a “red gel”.

Lever Brothers also tried to stretch the name beyond the tube. Chicago Tribune columnist George Lazarus wrote on 17 March 1988 that Lever had “recently trotted out a toothbrush under the Aim banner (the same name as its toothpaste)”, at a time when the toothbrush shelf was led by Oral-B and Johnson & Johnson’s Reach. Lazarus reported that the brush had not done well The toothpaste remained the product sold under the name.

Aim was one of several oral care names in the Unilever portfolio in North America. By 2003 the American and Canadian business also included Pepsodent, which Unilever had bought in 1942 according to English Wikipedia; Close-Up, a gel toothpaste Unilever launched in 1967, according to the same encyclopedia; and Mentadent, which Church & Dwight described in 2003 as introduced in the early 1990s in a dual-chamber pump. Of the four names, Aim was the shortest.

From Unilever to Church & Dwight.

The change of owner was announced on a single day. On 10 September 2003, Unilever issued a statement through the London Stock Exchange’s news service saying it had signed a definitive agreement to sell its oral care brands in the United States and Canada to Church & Dwight of Princeton, New Jersey. The sale covered, for those two countries, the Mentadent brand of toothpaste and toothbrushes, Pepsodent and Aim toothpaste, and exclusive licensing rights to Close-Up toothpaste. Unilever described the sale as part of its “Path to Growth” strategy of reducing the number of brands in its portfolio, and said it remained committed to oral care outside the United States and Canada.

Church & Dwight published its own release the same day through Business Wire. Its chairman and chief executive, Robert A. Davies III, said the four brands were well established with distinct positions, and the release described Pepsodent and Aim, “a traditional toothpaste and gel respectively”, as value brands with distribution in mass-market and dollar stores. Davies acknowledged that the business “has recently been in decline” but said the company believed “the brand equities remain strong”. The release also said Church & Dwight would move manufacture of the acquired toothpaste brands, over the following twelve months, to its plant at Lakewood, New Jersey, which it said specialised in personal care products.

Reuters, in a report carried by CNN Money on 10 September 2003, set the deal in context. It noted that Church & Dwight, the maker of Arm & Hammer baking soda and Brillo pads, would combine the Unilever toothpaste brands with its own Arm & Hammer toothpaste, and quoted an analyst at CIBC World Markets describing the purchase as a meaningful one for Church & Dwight even though it was a small matter for Unilever. Unilever had said it expected the transaction to be completed in the fourth quarter.

The deal closed the following month. English Wikipedia’s article on Church & Dwight, citing the company’s 2005 annual report, says Church & Dwight purchased the United States and Canadian rights to Aim, Pepsodent, Mentadent and Close-Up on 20 October 2003. Church & Dwight has owned Aim in the United States and Canada since 2003. Of the four names, Mentadent did not last: Wikipedia records that Church & Dwight announced in 2016 that it would discontinue the brand from spring 2017, while Unilever continued to sell Mentadent in other markets.

Outside North America the Aim name has its own history. English Wikipedia’s list of toothpaste brands says that in Australia Aim is made and distributed by Pental, the Shepparton household products company, and Pental’s website lists AIM toothpaste among its brands. In the United States, Church & Dwight, which gives Ewing, New Jersey, as its base on its website, publishes ingredient disclosure forms for products sold as Aim Multi Benefit gels in its dental care category.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on the same few shelves of a pharmacy or supermarket: mouthwash, toothbrushes, toothpaste and eye drops. They belong to a category in which the pack has to carry a great deal in a small space, and in which many of the names have passed through several owners while staying on the shelf under the same word.

Each format sets its own limits. A mouthwash bottle is a tall, see-through container, so the colour of the liquid inside often becomes part of the look, and the label wraps around a curved surface. A toothbrush is usually sold in a blister pack, a clear plastic shell over a printed card, where the brush itself is on show and the card has to hold the name, the head and the range. Eye drops come in a very small bottle inside a folding carton, so the carton front does most of the work, and the type has to stay legible at a few centimetres across.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its packs and advertising have changed — and leaves out anything that cannot be dated.

A challenger’s name, a value position and a family of sibling brands.

The story of Aim is a story about position more than about pictures. The 1974 speech by Ogilvy & Mather’s Charles Fredericks presented the brand to the advertising industry as a new brand entering a market dominated by Crest and Colgate, under the title WARC gives it, “How Do You Tackle The Leaders?”. Twenty-nine years later Church & Dwight used similar language from the other side, describing Aim as a value brand with strong distribution in mass-market and dollar channels.

The name is a single verb of three letters. Pental’s brand page sets it in capitals, AIM, while Church & Dwight’s ingredient disclosures write it as Aim. The current descriptors, such as the Multi Benefit line that Church & Dwight lists in its ingredient disclosures, pair the brand name with a variant name.

The brand also shows how a portfolio can travel as a set. Aim moved from Unilever to Church & Dwight in one transaction, alongside Pepsodent, Close-Up and Mentadent, and joined a company whose own oral care identity was built on Arm & Hammer baking soda. Within that group the brands took different paths: one was discontinued, one was a licence, and Aim remained a stand-alone name with its own range of gels. The 2003 releases from both companies, and the Reuters report of the same day, named each brand separately.

Aim also illustrates the limits of stretching a name. The 1988 Chicago Tribune column that recorded a Lever toothbrush under the Aim banner reported that it had not done well. Church & Dwight’s 2003 release described Aim as a gel toothpaste, and the products it lists under the name today are gels.

For a design guide, Aim shows how a short, verb-shaped name can carry a challenger brand from a 1970s launch campaign through a change of owner, with the brand name set large and variant names set beneath it. Compare it with Crest, one of the two brands named in the 1974 talk, and Arm & Hammer, the Church & Dwight brand Aim joined in 2003. For this guide we use gel red and deep crimson on mint frost with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Aim’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.