How a Paint Company Lures You in with Their Color Wheel Display

Your average paint company knows that their most important advertising is done inside the paint retail location.  A brand’s paint color display (or color wheel) is its best tool to attract you to their paint.  How can a paint company use its own color wheel to lure you to their brand?  The answer is easy… color.  For centuries, advertisers have used bright, bold colors to focus the attention of customers on their brand.  The power of bright colors is evident in signs, logos, and almost every form of commercial marketing.  This fact is common knowledge, and yet it still comes as a surprise to many people that paint companies use these same tactics to draw your attention to their line of paint colors inside every home improvement store.

Using the Sample Card to Sell the Color Wheel





Brightest Colors Front and Center!

 

Of course, paint companies are a little sneakier than traditional marketers.  Paint brands know that when you are faced with an array of paint displays (such as in your local hardware/home improvement store), you are most likely to focus your attention on the color wheel display that most attracts your eye.  Since the marketers of paint brands understand the human (or perhaps, “animal”) attraction to bright colors, they know how important it is to include bright, bold colors in their paint lines and place them front and center in their displays.  This is the best way to attract your attention to a paint company’s color wheel.

So how does a paint company accomplish this color hypnosis of potential customers?  Well, it starts with the sample card.  Have you ever noticed how the brightest, most saturated color sample cards are always the first row you see in a paint display?  Well you guessed it… paint companies are playing with a loaded deck (of sample cards, that is)!

But a Bogus Sample Card Equals Bogus Paint Colors

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with stacking sample cards in the color wheel display so that the most attractive colors are the most visible.  The problem occurs because so many of those bold, dramatic, “attractive” colors are basically useless as paint colors in your home!





Bright, Bold Colors on Top!

  

It’s funny, but many of the colors that a paint company puts in its line would never look good painted on any wall.  The colors are 100% used to grab your attention when you are perusing paint displays.  People are helplessly attracted to bright colors; they are much more eye-catching and far more interesting to our brains.

Sadly, not only are people more attracted to the paint color wheels because of these colors, but beginners are more likely to find one of these bright, saturated colors most attractive and end up choosing one as their new paint color.  Unfortunately, for most of the reasons discussed above, those colors look ridiculous painted on walls.

To be fair, when brighter colors are painted on smaller surfaces, such as in an accent color, on trim, on a partial wall, etc, they are far less offensive than when they cover a room.  But the brightest colors in the display – with the least amount of white, black, or gray mixed in – will rarely even work in these applications.

Obviously, when mistakes like this occur paint companies have nothing to lose.  Whenever people pick paint colors that they are unhappy with, the paint company does not have to refund the customers’ money.  In fact, no paint brand in the country will allow you to return paint once you have purchased it.  Even better (for the paint company), since the customer is unhappy with the paint color they chose, they are probably just going to buy a whole new batch of paints!

Designer Paint Color Wheels




Behr Paint Color Wheel

 

Of course, there are a multitude of distorting factors making it difficult to pick paint colors that will end up looking attractive on your wall.  So, rather than filling the world with disgruntled customers, paint companies have offered the marketplace a basic solution to their problem of conflicting interests.  That solution is the designer, or “signature” brands that most paint companies now offer to accompany their primary brand.




Designer Paint Colors

 

Valspar Paint, for instance, also produces paint branded as Laura Ashley, Eddie Bauer, Waverly, and more.  These separate lines, or collections, have their own color wheel displays and are usually available wherever the primary brand, Valspar in this case, are sold.  Other examples are Disney Paints, currently produced by Behr, and Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart, formerly produced by Sherwin Williams.

By licensing these names, paint companies and retailers are taking advantage of the popularity of these well-known brands to attract you to these paints; that way they don’t have to use obnoxious colors to bring your attention to their color wheel.  If you look at the colors in these displays you will notice that they are generally missing those bright, saturated tones.  Instead, most of the colors are more neutralized.  Naturally, these colors are much more attractive to paint on a wall in your home.

Paying for a Brand Name Paint Color?

If you are worried about ending up with an ugly paint color, you may be somewhat safer utilizing one of these designer collections.  However, the color range offered by any one of these alternative brands is very limited and typically the whole line of hues is all neutralized to about the same tone.  This gives the smaller brand a nice consistent look, but it doesn’t allow for much variety.  Also, these signature paints are typically more expensive (often 50% more) despite the fact that you can get very similar colors from the primary “mother” brand for considerably less money.

By the way, do you want to learn more about how paint company marketers influence your paint color decisions?

If so, check out this blog post:  “When Choosing Your Paint Color…  Don’t Get Fooled by the Color Names!”

Or do you need to know exactly how to adjust for the problems that overly bright/saturated paint colors cause?

If so, this article will give you everything you need to know: “Paint Companies Make 40% of Their Profits from Your Paint Color Mistakes!”

Do you want to know how to save $1000s on paint and remodeling projects, pick perfect paint colors, design beautiful interiors, and increase your home value 23% or more!?

If so, this will be exactly what you’ve been looking for: Paint Color Miracle ™

When Choosing Your Paint Color… Don’t Get Fooled by the Color Names!

Anyone who’s ever picked up a paint color sample card from the paint store is likely familiar with the name associated with each paint chip.  Many people find these color names intriguing (as they were designed to be), but most people have no idea how much influence the color’s name has over their paint selection process.

Influenced by Paint Color Names

A surprising number of people rely on the color names to give them important information about the paint color on the card.  In fact, in 2009, “Apartment Therapy” did a subscriber poll asking people if they ever chose a new paint color based on its name.  Of the respondents, 64% admitted to doing so at least “sometimes”!  As one of the contributors wrote, “With only a cursory look at the chips, we all voted for ‘Quiet Moments’.  We just couldn't imagine sleeping in a room called ‘Arctic Gray’, although the color was really nice.” 

Of course, the paint named “Quiet Moments” is not actually made of any quiet moments… any more than there is anything arctic about the paint named “Arctic Gray”.  But obviously, these are not just arbitrarily chosen words appended to the card to help you remember which paint color is which… oh, no.  In reality, a paint company hires professional writers, Advertising Copywriters, and the like, to come up with meaningful, image-evoking, nostalgia-inducing, emotion-linked names in hopes that they will attract you to one of their colors. 

That’s right, the simple 1 to 3 word name inscribed in the corner of every paint chip, which is usually something like, “summer morn”, “evening kiss”, “sweet tomato”, or “harvest breeze”, is the product of a tremendous amount of time and energy on the behalf of any paint company.

The Paint Company Practice of Sample Card Marketing

The motive behind all this pretense is that paint color sample cards are used as a major marketing tool for paint companies.  Paint brands encourage you to collect their sample cards because doing so is just like taking a paint company brochure home with you.  It’s essentially free advertising, right in the customers’ hands!  The more color cards you have from a paint company -- the more likely you are to buy one of their paints.  

The color names on these cards are a powerful use of a paint company’s marketing reach.  But in order for this advertising to work, the marketers have to give you a product message.  If an advertiser can connect a visual cue to an auditory stimulus that activates an emotional response, and then associate that response with their brand, then they have given you one complete marketing message -- with every color! 

The Emotional Sway of Color Names

But here’s the part that hits home.  The survey results mentioned above only reveal the people that consciously and intentionally used the color’s name to make a color choice; we would suggest that -- especially since the words are so emotionally linked -- a much greater proportion of paint buyers have chosen a color, at least partially because of an impression made with this word association gimmick -- even without realizing it.

So, perhaps we should make this point yet a little plainer.  The series of words used as the “name” for a color is completely non-descriptive of the actual color, and has basically been arbitrarily assigned.  This is more evident in names like “Long Vacation”, “Triumphant”, “Old Pickup”, and “Noteworthy Tone” which don’t even vaguely suggest a general hue.  Most likely, paint color names are generated by a team of writers (or perhaps a computer) that produces a list of words with proven emotional significance.  Those words are then assigned to a given color based on the general impressions of a creative team (who probably have advertising backgrounds).  So the names do not describe colors; they do not relate to the actual color they are attached to (at all, in some cases). 

To put it another way, when you choose an interior color because you like its name, please keep in mind that there is not actually going to be any “Summer Camp” in that bucket of paint; and nobody is going to walk into a room and feel like they’ve entered a “Mountain Resort” just because you chose to paint your wall that color; and you will likely never even remember that your hallway is supposed to feel like a “Festive Celebration” unless you actually paint that color’s name on the wall there (which would be really funny – please send me pictures if you do that!) 

Hey, It Happens to the Best of Us!

But don’t feel bad if you have caught yourself considering a color’s name a little too carefully, we know how easy it is to do.  In fact, I started researching this article after I realized I needed to start covering the color names on each sample card I showed to my girlfriend because she kept using the names to form opinions about the colors!  (“I don’t care if you dislike sun-dried tomatoes… what do you think of the color ‘sun-dried tomatoes’!?”) We have all caught ourselves being swayed by these catchy names, but it can be hard to separate a color from an impression you have formed about it.  Remaining objective is an important part of the formula for creating beautiful spaces in your home.

By the way, do you want to learn more about how paint company marketers influence your paint color decisions?

If so, check out this blog post:  “Paint Company Color Wheels”

Or do you need to know exactly how to choose the best paint color for your home?

If so, this article will give you everything you need to know: “Best Paint Color Ideas”

Do you want to know how to save $1000s on paint and remodeling projects, pick perfect paint colors, design beautiful interiors, and increase your home’s value by 23% or more!?

If so, this will be exactly what you’ve been looking for: Paint Color Miracle ™