What Tiger Woods Can Teach You About Marketing
This post has nothing whatsoever to do with Tiger Woods. It has to do with follow-through, something I hear Tiger Woods is very good at.
My apartment is painted beige. The actual name of the color is “Surrey Beige”, arguably the most boring name in the history of the interior paint industry. My mother would love it. I would prefer to call it something like “Mushroom” or “Mochaccino”, but I am not in charge of naming paint colors, although I probably should be. (Does anybody out there run a paint company? If so, can I have a job?)
Moving on. The other day, I was reading a boring home decorating magazine, one of those ones that exists for the sole purpose of procuring advertising dollars. (Kind of like some blogs I know.) I run across an ad for Beauti-Tone paint. Beauti-Tone is a Canadian brand that’s been hit pretty hard by the emergence of the Martha Stewart, Debbie Travis, Disney, and NFL paint lines. Beauti-Tone is not sexy.
A few years ago, paint manufacturers didn’t have to be sexy. They had to make decent paint. It was a commonly accepted fact that the color you buy, once on your walls, would bear no resemblance to the color on the card you spent an hour choosing. You hoped for the best and bought something that wasn’t too ugly. That was it.
Now, though, the paint industry is very different. Now, paint is sexy. Paint is indicative of something bigger. Take a look in your local Home Depot and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. People actually have brand loyalties now. I used to be a Martha Stewart paint chick. Recently, I’ve moved my loyalty over to Debbie Travis. If we ever buy a house (ha!), Jack’s room will be painted something like 100 Acre Sky or Bibbidi Bobbidi Blue. If I had a girl, which I don’t because God thinks He’s funny, there might be some Pixie Dust involved.
Paint is serious shit, people.
Anyway, Beauti-Tone. The ad is perfect. Adorable. Edible. I am a marketing professional and I’m normally pretty immune to stuff like this, but I wanted to pack my stuff and move in to this ad. There is a Golden Retriever. There is a couple lazing around in bed. There is a fluffy white duvet. And there is a paint chip. On the paint chip, it says “Snuggle In.”
Now, I happen to know that many of the readers of this blog are men and they don’t give a damn about things like paint colors. I also happen to know that the primary buyers of paint are women. And women eat this stuff up.
Anyway, what do I do? I rip the page out of the magazine, I put on my coat, and I start walking to the hardware store. (I’ll add here that the color of the paint in the ad is, for all intents and purposes, the exact color of the paint already on my walls. And yes, I’m about to buy it anyway. The ad was that good. They are selling a good life involving dogs and duvets and devoted children and damn it, I want some.)
I get to the paint section of the hardware store, giddy with the promise of new paint. I look. I look. I look some more. There is Beauti-Tone but there is no Snuggle In. There is a conspicuous lack of snuggling in any capacity. There are some numbers – sexy ones like W3033-1. But no Snuggle In.
I go home, snuggle free and defeated. I go on the internet – no catalog. I go to a different paint store. Snuggless.
I am disappointed. I talk to my husband. We discuss our lack of paint. We think about the walls in our home business office. We decide white would probably be better. I go back to the hardware store. I buy paint.
White paint, by Debbie Travis.
(I later found out that Beauti-Tone does, in fact, list their paint colors on their cards. In small print. On the bottom. On the back.)
What lesson do we learn from Beauti-Tone’s big ass screw up?
Follow through, for God’s sake.
Know what you have going for you and play it up. Bleed it dry. Beat people over the head with it. If you make ordinary paint but it has a great name, plaster that son of a bitch every which way till Friday. Or Saturday, for that matter.
Do not promise people Snuggle In and give them W3033-1.
Do not start and then refuse to finish.
Do not give people a taste of your greatness, only to recede back into mediocrity.
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