Dulux: A Fresh Lick of Paint

People want to talk about colour not paint – so says Rik Haslam of RAPP, who along with BBH London has been hired to give Dulux’s marketing a makeover. And colour us crazy if he’s not right – paint is dull but colour is fun and transformative. As the brand’s recent comic spots show, red makes you randy, pink lures the ladies and jungle hues quieten the kids. Isobel Roberts reviews  a chromatic caign and a certain black and white dog

These past few years have been tricky ones for any brand trying to win a slice of the home décor pie. With the global economy still finding its feet, home improvement hasn’t been top of many consumers’ priority lists. Add in a sluggish property market, thus fewer people moving house, and the result is  less cash spent on redecorating. The whole industry has faced the same problems, but over at Dulux they’ve tackled these changes head-on by not only updating their marketing approach but also recruiting two new agencies to handle their business.

Back in June 2011, Dulux hired BBH London to take care of its UK and global creative output and at the end of 2012 digital shop RAPP was also tapped to rev the brand’s global digital presence. While both agencies were tasked with different briefs, there was one common thread; to build a communications strategy around the idea at the core of the brand – colour.

“The key to creating a global voice for your brand is by being clear on what you stand for and by finding a genuine consumer insight that can transcend markets,” explains Jennifer Hall, market controller for Dulux. “How you activate that can then be maximised or tailored by local markets in order to gain a deeper connection with the consumer. Colour has an instinctive emotional power that can change more in your life than just your walls.

"Not only do certain colours create certain moods and feelings, but decorating tends to accompany key moments in life, be that moving into your first property as a couple, or the birth of a child, therefore heightening the emotional link with the colour you chose.”

Armed with the tagline Let’s Colour, Dulux’s expansive range of hues has long been the brand’s key link to customers. First launched as a premium product in the 30s, it’s a name with a strong legacy and the strength of its marketing has come from its association with the emotive power of colour. Over in the Dulux marketing team, they call this brand positioning ‘renewal’ – more than just a lick of paint, the product can also deliver an emotional impact too.

“Colour is transformative,” explains Paul Randle, global digital marketing director at Dulux’s parent company AkzoNobel. “Even at this very moment the colours on this page will be affecting your mental state. Some colours sooth, some excite, some can help us focus and study. When applied to any human environment the impact is dramatic. Dulux is the global authority on colour and that lends us the authority to be the chion of renewal in our busy lives.”

This core idea has been translated into the creative content delivered by both BBH and RAPP. In the case of the former, the agency was given responsibility for developing the brand’s overall, global creative strategy and sends out ideas for local partner agencies to work on and adapt to their market. BBH was also charged with crafting a new caign for the UK market and its first trio of TV spots launched last year, bringing that connection between colour and emotion into everyday situations. In the first spot, Boudoir, a man returns home to discover his wife has painted their bedroom a vibrant shade of red.

The young couple are soon engaged in a romantic embrace, before the timeline fast-forwards and we see the now-pregnant woman painting the wall back to a neutral colour – with two kids screaming in the background. Rather than a more generalised approach to colour previously seen in the brand’s work, the playful spot displayed a new direction by highlighting direct product benefits.

“We made mini ‘slice-of-life’ narratives,” explains Nick Allsop, creative director on both the global and UK Dulux accounts, “that took place in a recognisable world [and] worked better than some sort of uplifting ‘manifesto of colour’ or a grandiose piece on the power of colour. We wanted to demonstrate paint’s power to an audience who found the thought of painting an expensive chore.”

Don’t confuse the canine

Adding in a dose of comedy to try to entertain a cynical audience, the creative team discovered that the ads were also better received when the renewal idea was played up. Taking this to heart, in the second film, Student, a young guy is mocked by his male housemates when he decides to paint his room a lively shade of pink.

But when they have a dismal turnout at their house party, the lads discover that those rose walls have in fact attracted all the action – and all the females. The third and final spot, Jungle, stars a worn-out mum and dad who finally get a lie-in after sprucing up their kids’ bedroom, and for Allsop the vital component of all three ads was displaying the real-life impact of redecorating.

“This is our driving creative thought for Dulux in a nutshell – to build from the functional properties of paint to an emotional end benefit for the painter,” he elaborates. “Ultimately, colour should be like music: its mood-altering power is understood by everyone with an iTunes account, not just musicians. And yet people are so anxious about colour, worried they might make a ‘mistake’, do something naff to their home because they didn’t go to art school. But if they think about what they want to change about the life lived in their home first, choosing colours becomes easier. All our creative work tries to get this across as clearly as possible.”

But perhaps just as important as creating entertaining and engaging storylines was the caign’s revival of the brand’s infamous mascot – the old English sheepdog. Iconic enough to rechristen the breed the ‘Dulux dogs’ for a whole generation, the lovable, lolloping character had last appeared in 2003, only returning in 2011 for the starring role in a one-off spot by McCann Erickson that celebrated 50 years of the mascot. For their longer-term strategy, however, the BBH team decided not to follow a canine-focused route. “We didn’t want to build a caign around him,” explains Allsop, “but use him in a cameo role to heighten the humour, brand the spots, and work as a subtle quality cue, which is how he’s been used best throughout his history. Besides, if you’ve ever worked with old English sheepdogs, you’ll know it’s best not to ask them to do anything complicated.”

Searching for a little local colour

Turning to the digital face of the brand, the team at RAPP had a huge undertaking when they took on the account a year ago – to replace the brand’s 700 or so disparate sites with one, unified platform. The issues involved were manifold. On top of the fact that the brand operates under different names in different markets, the digital knowledge of its employees also varied vastly from country to country, and there were few exles where the brand had been effectively used in search, mobile or social media.

But for chief creative officer Rik Haslam, this was precisely what made the challenge an interesting one: “It appeared that the entire ecosystem needed to be built from the ground up. It’s very rare that agencies have the opportunity to start with a blank slate and that’s what made this such an exciting brief.”

Working with offices across RAPP’s network, from Russia to India to Brazil, the teams collaborated to develop a global strategy that also considered local factors. Through their research they discovered that the one element linking all their customers, wherever they might be, was search. Consumers across the globe were taking to the web to look for inspiration for decorating, to find store locations and to seek out special deals. In order to send Dulux to the top of the search rankings organically, RAPP realised that creating exciting content would be the crucial element in the brand’s digital redesign.

“The creative challenge was to ensure that every element of the digital experience was truly engaging,” continues Haslam. “We decided to put colour at the heart of every idea and to communicate the transformative impact colour could have on people’s lives, homes and relationships. The core site experience is navigated through a colour wheel, which dynamically defines the core content. We created a vast quantity of editorial content, video and photography in order to enable such a rich personal experience. And all of this content was categorised and tagged in myriad ways – for exle somebody searching Google for ‘the calming effect of blue’ will discover links and images that direct them to a web page full of inspirational content related to the colour blue.”

One interesting part of that content came in the form of a series of short documentary films that actually demonstrated the change colour had initiated in people’s lives. The creative team scoured for stories that would embody Dulux’s message as well as encapsulate the brand’s global reach, and produced five distinct films from different parts of the world. One piece centred on a Brazilian fisherman and how the colour red had helped turn his fortunes around, while another featured a Mumbai street artist who had used fuchsia as a way to rebel. The films helped move the conversation from paint to colour in a way that involved real people.

Developing content beyond the brand’s own domain has been another of RAPP’s task. As well as established platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, more recent tools that showcase the visual side of the web, such as Pinterest, have proved essential. The agency has also worked to introduce interactive ideas, such as a soon-to-launch Facebook app that helps users discover their own personal relationship with colour. After analysing a user’s photo to see what affiliations, subconscious or not, they have with particular colours, the app takes that information and transforms it into a unique piece of artwork. 

“It’s colour that people have an emotional relationship to,” believes Haslam. “It’s colour that changes lives, moods, feelings, it’s particular colours that we are all individually drawn to. Paint is one way of playing with colour. Dulux makes paint, but it’s a brand rooted in colour so the conversations we want to have, the content we want to create and the stories people like to share are all about colour rather than paint.”

Since taking on the Dulux account, both RAPP and BBH have helped deliver a fresh perspective for the brand in different ways. As client and agency relationships go, however, these two are still fairly new and both shops say what we’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg. While much of the hard graft has been happening behind the scenes, both are getting ready to roll out a host of new ideas and content.

On the move with Dulux

“Next year will be a big one for Dulux,” agrees Dulux’s Jennifer Hall, “we want to keep building the momentum behind inspiring and encouraging people to make a change to their home not because they have to but because they want to. We’re looking at numerous activities to achieve this; new content development, using new talent in the industry, a new level of creativity and imagination from the brand [but] always giving people clear reasons as to why they should decorate with Dulux.”

With the housing market also finally delivering some good news and showing signs of life once again, it looks like Dulux is fully primed and ready to go.