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June 7, 2010

Using Appeals to Emotions to Sell Paint

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
THE collapse of the housing market has hurt paint sales, with total revenue for exterior paint
falling 12 percent from 2007 to 2009, according to a recent report by Mintel, a market research
company. But interior paint has fared better, with sales slipping just 3 percent during the
period, because of what Mintel calls “a silver lining” to the downturn: cocooning. As short-on-
cash people spend more time at home, sprucing up the rumpus room with a fresh coat of
semigloss apparently seems to be worth the expense and effort.

Now a new television commercial by the paint company Valspar is taking an unusual approach
to selling interior paint: it never shows an interior, or consumers painting. The spot, by Euro
RSCG Chicago, opens with a couple walking on white sand toward a white wall, which resembles
a drive-in movie screen, as a voice-over begins, “To some, a wall is just a wall — a divider
between here and there.” The couple begin to guide the wall through various spectacular
landscapes, and the wall assumes the color of the backdrops, from the incandescent green of
flora near a waterfall to the warm tan of a hayfield to the reddish brown of a mountain setting.

“To others, a wall is a canvas, an invitation, a blank slate,” the voice-over continues to a lush
soundtrack. “The right color can turn any wall into so much more.”

Paint advertising typically emphasizes quality and color selection, and depicts homeowners
applying paint to walls.

“What you see in almost every paint commercial is couples in blue jeans and flannel shirts
holding rollers and going up and down on the wall and whistling while they work, and Valspar
didn’t need to go there,” said Steffan Postaer, chief creative officer at Euro RSCG Chicago. “We
don’t show people painting walls, or interiors, or any of the kind of mundane aspects of the
chore. It’s more about the mind-space of the consumer — we’re talking to their imagination and
emotions.”

The latest commercial was shot at locations throughout Australia, with the wall, which measures
16 feet by 30 feet, being hauled and repainted. Other Valspar campaigns by the agency in
recent years also have featured natural settings, such as spots in 2008 that showed objects like

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lily pads and trees with squares cut out, which transformed into square color samples.

Valspar originated as the plainly named Paint and Color in Boston in 1806, but in recent decades
has not been a household name like Sherwin-Williams or Benjamin Moore because at the
consumer level it mainly produced paint for retailers to sell as store brands, most notably at
Lowe’s. But in 2007, the company decided to market paint, at Lowe’s and elsewhere, primarily
under its own brand name.

Valspar spent $35.2 million on advertising in 2009, less than Sherwin-Williams, which spent
$52 million, and more than Benjamin Moore, which spent $12.6 million, according to Kantar
Media.

A current Benjamin Moore campaign on which the company has said it is spending $15 million
emphasizes that it is the choice of professionals, and features several interior designers and
contractors who describe their aesthetic approaches and laud the brand for quality and the
vibrancy of its colors.

“There are 179 shades of white — Benjamin Moore clearly understands that white is a color,”
says the designer Darryl Carter in one of the spots, by the New York office of Cramer-Krasselt.
“And given what I do, it’s critical to have those variables.”

Susanne Champ, director of marketing at Valspar, said that when the brand surveyed
advertising in the category a few years ago, it was like watching paint dry. Most paint
commercials were “real yawners,” she said.

“Everyone’s fighting over the same features and benefits,” Ms. Champ said, rattling off typical
claims. “ ‘I have 3,500 colors,’ ‘No, I have 4,000 colors,’ ‘Mine’s a paint and primer in one.’
Everyone is working on the same benefits — and showing people rolling paint on the wall.”

But Ms. Champ said that when Valspar surveyed consumers, “they told us that painting is an
emotional journey with lots of highs and lows,” and that applying paint itself was certainly not
the high point.

“They enjoy the first roll on the wall, but they don’t want to be reminded of all that work,” Ms.
Champ said. “Consumers talk about what they feel when they finish the project, and that’s a
sense of pride and accomplishment. They say, ‘I feel like an artist,’ and ‘I feel a sense of
freedom and joy.’ They ladder up to a lot of high-level emotional benefits, and that’s what we’re
trying to tap into through this campaign.”

When it comes to future advertising, Valspar itself is now looking at a blank wall. The company
recently dismissed Euro RSCG Chicago after the agency’s London office became the agency of
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record for Dulux, a competing paint brand. Ms. Champ described it as an “amicable separation.”

Mintel, meanwhile, paints the industry and the economy with the same broad strokes.

“Sales are again likely to fall in 2010,” according to the Mintel report. “Pent-up demand is
building for paint products, but it will take a rebound in employment, which leads to increased
home moving, to get the extensive renovation and repair projects to drive the market higher.”

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