Normally, when we talk about watching paint dry, we’re referring to something tedious or boring. But for the leadership at Ace Hardware, paint is pretty exciting. According to this New York Times article, a new product line (coupled with an insightful marketing approach) may be what it takes to allow the 4,300+ hardware and home improvement store chain to double their share of the domestic paint market.
Brand Modeling and the Search for a New Growth Strategy
Dominant organizations are engaged in a continual search for growth opportunities. What are the best ways to increase market share, raise a brand’s visibility, and connect more effectively with their customers? It’s easy to generate potential strategies that should create growth, but it’s remarkably difficult to assess ahead of time which strategies are going to succeed. It’s even tougher to tell which campaigns will be the most successful and deliver the highest return on investment.
Which brings us to Ace Hardware. This well-established brand has numerous options available to it. Ace Hardware has the resources and ability to pursue growth in any of several directions. We think that Ace’s leadership team has made a smart decision by focusing on the paint portion of their business. Their approach shows that there’s been a concerted effort to understand and better serve their customer.
Know Your Customer To Build Your Brand
What is the power of paint? Some analysts have compared painting the house to the famous lipstick effect—a quick and affordable way to lift the spirits when it’s not economically feasible to make larger, more indulgent purchases. Ace Hardware’s customers may not be in a position to renovate the entire kitchen or do over the bathroom. Yet they’re still driven by the need to make positive changes in their environment.
Painting a room delivers a powerful visual and emotional impact for a relatively small financial investment. Ace is demonstrating superior customer knowledge by providing a way to fill a significant emotional need while being sensitive to the current economic tensions and challenges their customer base is facing.
At the same time, Ace has used a very gender-specific, romance-oriented approach to marketing their new line of paint. Color choices are overwhelmingly made by women, according to Dana Larsen, an Ace Brand manager. The new campaign is based around the need for strong, satisfying, loving relationships—finding the perfect shade, color, or hue is referred to as finding your “soul paint.”
This recognizes and capitalizes on the biological driver that urges us to form lasting bonds. Couple it with some visual humor (after all, there’s something inherently funny about a line-up of 8 purple people) and you have a message that appeals to Ace’s customers on a number of levels.
Will Ace be able to meet their goal of doubling their market share by 2015? Appealing to their customers through multiple psychologically-appealing channels is not a bad start. Understanding the tensions and pressures facing their customer base, providing an economical means to satisfying compelling emotional needs, and honoring the underlying unconscious drivers of customer behavior are all steps dominant organizations use when they want to grow. That’s the value of putting customers first.