Sherwin-Williams uses a colorful, integrated approach to cultivating relationships

Ask any kid with a crayon box and he or she will tell you that colors convey emotions. Most of us have an emotional connection to certain colors; they affect the way we feel and the energy that we bring to our work. Color can also have cultural and symbolic resonance, even religious significance.

Sherwin-Williams knows all this. After all, they’ve been selling paint for 140 years. But lately, Sherwin-Williams has been waging a battle against its competitors to carve out mind share among a very important customer group: interior designers. The venerable institution wanted to show that they really understood current design trends and had products that were appropriate to interior designers’ needs.

And a specialty magazine might fit that bill quite nicely. But what started as a straightforward custom-publishing effort has bloomed into an integrated multimedia campaign.

In 2004, Sherwin-Williams signed on media company Hanley Wood Marketing to help brand, launch and shepherd its inaugural publication, appropriately dubbed STIR. Bryan Iwamoto, creative director at Hanley Wood, says that the challenge in launching STIR was to differentiate it from the numerous existing magazines aimed at interior designers. “They all feature very similar subject matter: beautiful interiors and furniture, and how to put colors together,” he says. “Prominent designers already know the color trends and how to put a color palette together. They want more insight into color and psychology, culture and the science of color.”

STIR adopted a 50,000-foot point of view toward color, not focusing on the “how” but rather the “why.” “The goal was to become the reader’s primary source of information about color,” says Jason Ulrich, vice president of client services at Hanley Wood. “We needed to be different, so we decided to focus on color: the history, the psychology and the cultural significance. We wanted to create a magazine that was more like a resource and less like a catalog. And in doing so, we would create a relationship with this audience.”

So, for example, the editors are planning an article that features the color red – its symbolism across different cultures, the psychology of red and how it affects the emotions and the senses. The article will also explain where red pigments come from, and what ingredients have been used historically to create various shades of red. A past article extolled the wonders of white. “Paint companies offer more options for white than for any other color,” says Iwamoto. “The article talked about why that is, as well as the effects that white can have on people who live or work in a white environment.”

The key to STIR’s credibility, according to Ulrich, lies in its light touch. “We purposely branded STIR so that it would not be heavy-handed from Sherwin-Williams’ perspective,” he says. “Not every solution we feature has to have something to do with Sherwin-Williams or even paint.”