Powered by Giveaway, Glidden.com Scores Engagement Boost, Web Marketing Honors

On October 4, paint manufacturer Glidden walked away with the Best in Show 2010 WebAward from the Web Marketing Association for its recently re-launched Web site, Glidden.com. But beyond its highly interactive redesign, the new site took away another honor: being named as a WMA “standard of excellence” specifically for its integration with the 2009 “Glidden Paint Giveaway” promotion. That campaign helped drive traffic to the site and eventually boosted both page views and time spent on site by triple-digit percentages.

Both the promotion and the Web re-launch were intended as ways to reinvent the Glidden brand, founded in 1874 and now owned by Azko Nobel Paints LLC. While well respected, Glidden had suffered an erosion in relevance among paint shoppers and an accompanying decline in market share. So 18 months ago the company decided to work with its agency Hitchcock Fleming & Associates to put a new coat of relevance on its product line.

“This was our opportunity to refocus the brand against a specific segment of the do-it-yourself consumer,” says Rob Horton, Azko Nobel’s vice president of marketing. That target segment was the buyer who felt primarily confusion when confronted with an endless array of paint colors.

“She’s fairly overwhelmed by the number of choices she has to make in her paint decision, from color to sheen to product to how to get the paint up onto the wall,” Horton says. “Nobody in the category was addressing this. Everything was about beautiful spaces and rooms that nobody lives in, and if a thousand colors were good, two thousand must be better. We saw Glidden’s opportunity in the category as making it easier for the overwhelmed consumer to get her painting project done.”

The company began by reducing its color center choices—the palette of basic color choices that the consumer starts with—from more than a thousand down to 282. (In Home Depot stores, where Glidden sells its brand, shoppers can still mix those choices to arrive at just as many color options as they had previously.) It also increased the size of the sample paint chips available in-store, to make it easier for most users to visualize new colors in a room

Reducing the basic starter set of colors by three quarters allowed HFA to develop a Web site that lets users see the whole spectrum of choices to begin with, then select a specific range and drag that color to the wall, ceiling, or trim of a generic room. They can also apply different colors to an adjoining room, since “We’ve found that once you finish painting one room, most people want to get started on the next one,” Horton says.

For those who think even 282 color options are a bit much, Glidden experts and HFA also include 10 pre-selected palettes based on themes such as “Feels Like Home”, “Quiet Time” and “Colors of Rome”. Another simplifying feature lets users match a mood they want to create in a room, from “contemplative” or “refreshed” through “light-hearted” and even “ladylike”.

Registered users can save their color choices at the site and share their designs with friends over the Web. They can also print out an exact .pdf shopping list of their project for use during their next trip to Home Depot and including reminders for such things as paint rollers, drop cloths and primer.

Last year’s Glidden Paint Giveaway, launched in late June of 2009, worked off this interactive Room Painter feature. Visitors were able to come to the Web site, select the color they wanted to sample from the basic color chart, and enter their contact information to be sent a free quart of the color of their choice.

Promoted in broadcast commercials as well as through selected social media, the 2009 giveaway was a tremendous success, according to Nick Betro, president and chief creative officer of HFA. In fact it was so successful that the 300,000 free quarts budgeted, which were expected to last through the 10-day promotion, actually were claimed within the first three days. While the campaign was clear about offering free paint as long as supplies lasted, Glidden got so many visitors coming to the new site looking for the offer that the company opted to give those fans a substantial discount on the quart of their choice.

The tale of the tape measure suggests that both the Web redesign and the integrated promotion worked well. Eight months after the Web relaunch and the Paint Giveaway promo, Glidden’s market share of the DIY paint market increased 1.5%, while point of sale increased 50% year over year. Household penetration was up 26% in the same time, and repeat purchases were up 10%.

Meanwhile on the Web site, eight months after launch user time on site had increased 221.6% over the same date in 2009 and average page views per visitor had shot up almost 600%. Other indicators from page saves and shares to use of store locators showed the same upward trend, indicating that visitors who came to the site were measurably more engaged with its content and features.

“With the relaunch of Glidden.com we generated a significant amount of trial,” says Horton. “And since we’re also building repeat business, we feel really good about the fact that it’s not just trial but quality trial, and that so many users are staying within the franchise. Those metrics make us feel really confident that we understood what the consumer was looking for and were able to solve a unique problem for her.”

“When you’re doing a [brand] re-launch of this nature, one of the important things is to make people understand your quality. The focus of the free quart promotion was to give people a quart of paint in any color they chose, with no strings attached. We simply wanted to get the paint into their hands.”

In conferring the 2010 Best in Show WebAward to Glidden.com, the Web Marketing Association evaluated the site (and more than 2,000 others) on seven primary criteria– design, copywriting, innovation, content, interactivity, navigation and use of technology—award up to 10 points on each metric. Out of a possible 70-point total, the expert judges gave Glidden.com an impressive 69.5.

This year Glidden and HFA used the site as the focal point for another trialing promotion timed to the start of the painting season. For a week starting May 25, the “Get Color, Give Color” promotions let visitors come to the site and order two free tester kits in any colors from the 282 in the Room Painter. They could also volunteer the e-mail address of a friend, who would receive an invitation to come to the site and select a second pair of free testers.