Yes, sex sells. But I’m not selling sex.
From the Marlboro man to the Cadbury’s Flake girl, we’re suckers for saucy. Sex sells (now an official rule, because it even has an exception). But what if your product is inherently unsexy asks Adam Burns? Think insurance. Think tax. Think paint.
I don’t know when words like fast and curvy became sexy in my head. They used to describe my Scalextrix track, then they were awkward to say in public, then they stopped reminding me of electronic car racing games all together.
If you are marketing cars, this is a boon. The words you use to describe your stuff are also the words we use to describe stuff. Your go-to language is sexy. But what if you are marketing the all-in-one-body-stocking of products? What if it has the passion killing properties of French kissing a slug? What if it’s paint?
The answer, according to Paul Randle, Global Digital Marketing Director for (prepare yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, you may require a cold shower) international coatings company Akzo Nobel, is simple: look past the product to find the emotional connection.
In a thought-provoking interview with resident marketing expert, Ben Thompson, Randle explains that, whilst there is little love to be found pushing paint to consumers online, conversations about colour are a different matter.
“The colours that you surround yourself with affect your emotional state, whether you’re sleeping, whether you’re in a living room, or in a kitchen, or you’re thinking about a child’s bedroom,” says Randle. “And that’s very, very compelling… I was talking about paint, and people are having really emotive, really personal discussions around colour and around their decorative projects, and we were missing in that.”
This isn’t new. Coca-Cola has been marketing refreshment – now happiness – for years. It’s easier than carbonated water, high-fructose corn syrup, caffeine, phosphoric acid, E150d, and natural flavorings.
Where Randle’s advice takes off is how to approach the “really personal discussions”, which, as he points out, were not taking place in Akzo Nobel’s comfort zone.
“We’re a paint company. There should be forums about paint or DIY, and actually, the interesting conversations weren’t there.” The interesting conversations were in Mumsnet. Protected by a strong anti-marketing force field.
Randle’s solution was a team of experts called The Colour Collective (already a little more ooh-la-la). “We pulled together a global team… from colourologists to architects, interior designers to feng shui experts [and] including normal artists, who came together to start exploring the transformative power of colour. And that gave us content that was very lightly branded or even unbranded that naturally socialised, and then within each piece of content would encourage them to think more about colour, more about paint, and start gently nudging them down that sales funnel.”
Emotional connection, gentle nudging and a funnel. Hmm. Sounds sexy.
Adam has interviewed over 450 chief executives from Adidas to Zappos. He has spoken on communication, leadership, and innovation at several major conferences, for organisations as diverse as CA and CeBIT, and is Master of Ceremonies for a number of brilliant business events.