Product Launch

Strategy

We helped Sherwin-Williams’ director of color marketing launch and grow an annual color campaign. Its centerpiece is a color-trend forecast program called Colormix^®, which defines the company’s point of view on color at a thought-leadership level. The company delivers each Colormix forecast in the form of a palette of colors that tell a fresh story for the coming year.

To extend the Sherwin-Williams annual color forecast beyond a one-time event, we built out two sister campaigns: Sherwin-Williams Color of the Month, fueled by social media video and GIFs; and the Sherwin-Williams Color of the Year announcement each fall.

Solution

Using this serialized color marketing strategy, Sherwin-Williams now can tell a unique color story that DIY consumers, design professionals and painting contractors can follow throughout the year across media platforms, from any device.

We began by creating a master brand for the entire color campaign, including a logo lockup that tied each component of the campaign into a broader story and overall brand expression.

Next, we concepted and built out each of the core campaign elements:

• Colormix Color Forecast (annual): a print color card, thought-leadership content, videos and a web experience.
• Colormix events (fall and winter): Sherwin-Williams hosts design professionals at these gatherings across North America — Hanley Wood Marketing provides core content.
• Color of the Month (throughout the year): social media video, GIFs and supporting content.
• Color of the Year (fall): social media video, GIFs, dedicated emails and substantial earned media outreach.

To drive measurable customer engagement with each of the campaign components, we used social media targeting, email marketing, web banners, direct mail, site-specific marketing and more.

Outcome

In each year that Hanley Wood Marketing has produced Colormix, Color of the Month and Color of the Year, engagement with Sherwin-Williams color content has increased by every available metric.

• Online color-related video content continues to drive an increasing number of views, as well as engagement (as measured by likes, shares and comments).
• Total Sherwin-Williams social media follower growth has also increased.
• The number of design professionals opting in to attend Sherwin-Williams Colormix events has increased year over year in each year since the campaign launched.

The most important metric of all, paint sales gallon growth, reveals that Sherwin-Williams has seen year-over-year market-share gains and gallon growth in each year since the integrated color campaign began.