The colour clinic was about having a design dialogue with our customers and understanding colours. We work on the opportunity to develop something different that can bring us together as a team.
Objective: Create a platform where our customers will feel comfortable sharing information with us. This platform will be used to develop our relationship into a partnership moving forward as opposed to a vendor. We want Jotun to be positioned as a strategic partner with our customers rather than just a supplier.
The Colour Clinic (a short version of the colour school) included the below modules:
- Need for colour
- Appearance
- Arrangement
- How do we see colour?
- Anatomy of a trend
- Business of colour
- Micro trends in product design
The colour clinic was conducted with two of our customers: Arcelik and Vestel.
Arcelik:
Customer insight for Arcelik:
Each and every brand of Arcelik has a core value. The marketing & sales teams set keywords that will represent those brands through emotions. The keywords are set based on their perception of the market needs and requirements. It becomes the brief for the designers.
It appears that the colours are dictated by marketing and sales.
During the process of design the designers uses colours to incite emotions and feelings to reflect those keywords.
They look at trends & colours in 3 periods of time:
Current (present): The colours & trends will be based on people observation
Short term ( 2 years): Cross industries – considered as followers
Long term (3 – 5 years): Trend setters/owners.
Arcelik is currently in the Current and Short Term space (see above) but want to focus on the long term.
Vestel:
Customer insight for Vestel:
70% of Vestel Market is classic white. They also use keywords dictated by marketing to define a brand.
It also appears that final decisions for colours are dictated by the owner.
They have a very basic way of searching for trends. They mainly look for trends in exhibition & online search. Furniture & automotive are some of the industries they get influenced by. They also look into colours by looking at what they don’t want to have.
A lot of the ideas are grown in-house. They tried to implement a variety of colours but only few percentages were sold. This was mainly attributed to the fact that majority of their sales is done via dealers who dictate the colour (white) and this poses to be a huge problem for Vestel as they need to change the end user mindset.
One possible issue for the failure to sell their colours can be attributed to their lack of consumer insight. Latika pointed out that their colour ranges were too strong for the Turkish market and their process for collecting consumer intelligence was flawed as it involved bring a focus group into the Vestel premises to share feedback on their products.
The head designer communicated his frustration with the lack of success in selling colour and the inability to secure the right data to back his vision to aggressively branch out into colours.