Events

CMO Perspectives: BEHR Paint and The Home Depot Talk the 2024 Color of the Year

marketingcawpuser 8 months ago 4 min read

BEHR Paint Company chose the neutral, moody shade of Cracked Pepper as its 2024 Color of the Year last month. The annual selection, informed by consumer research, lifestyle trends and feedback from design experts, has evolved into a full-blown brand campaign with a retail media marketing partnership with The Home Depot, social media campaigns and experiential components, resulting in a dramatic increase in sales.

Our sister publication, Chief Marketer, spoke with the cmos of BEHR and The Home Depot about how the Color of the Year reveal has evolved over the years, the role that retail media plays in the partnership, trends in marketing home improvement to younger generations and the intersection of content and commerce.

More Experience Design Insights:

How do you go about choosing the Color of the Year? And why Cracked Pepper for 2024?

Jodi Allen, Global CMO, BEHR Paint Company: What’s great about the color is it’s very usable whether you’re painting inside—if you’re painting cabinets, your interior walls, furniture—but it’s also a great exterior color as well. We focused on making sure there was a color that was usable for DIYers, for designers and professionals.

We’ve created more of an experience to launch our color of the year. At the property that we’re on now in Napa, all the buildings’ exteriors are painted in a Cracked Pepper-like color, which provided the perfect backdrop for our 2024 Color of the Year announcement. We partner closely with The Home Depot, everything from picking the color to looking at the big trends that are out there around décor, and tying color and decor together to make a big statement. And with our partnership, help consumers as they’re looking to create the same experience at their homes.

Molly Battin, SVP and CMO at The Home Depot: Our partnership goes back 45 years. Our teams have worked closely together to bring this to life for our customers, and take everything that we know about The Home Depot customer and work with Jody’s team to bring a color palette that we know will resonate with them.

You’ve been unveiling the Color of the Year for several years now. What’s different about the partnership this year?

JA: We continue to evolve a little bit. The color is an important part, so we look at lifestyle trends and ensure we have a color that’s very usable—interior and exterior. The other thing is the experience, and creating this big moment to launch here at in Napa. We have a vignette where we brought the color to life here on the property, including a kitchen, a dining room and a living room, to show how the color and the decor items from The Home Depot worked together.

The other piece is a big consumer activation. We’re making sure we get this color in front of consumers so they can get it on their walls and see how it can changes the feeling of their room and their space.

We’re leveraging social media, specifically Instagram and TikTok, where we know consumers are looking for color and inspiration. We have a sweepstakes that we’re running on Instagram, where five winners will receive $10,000 to help them transform and elevate their space with Cracked Pepper.

How is The Home Depot specifically involved in the partnership?

MB: We have a retail media network where we leverage our first-party data so that we can understand where our audiences are, specifically where BEHR’s audiences are. We know where they are in their project. Are they looking for inspiration? Are they in the middle of doing it? Are they completing? So that we can put the right message in front of them. This is a perfect moment in time for us to come together, leverage our data and lean into both on homedepot.com as well as partner off-channel sites. We do a lot with Google and Pinterest to deepen engagement. We’ve done a lot in that retail media space, and as we go into this fall, and even with College Game Day coming up, BEHR is a big partner in that.