Applied Empathy

by Michael Ventura

  Pantone’s parent company, X-Rite, Inc., had recently been acquired by Danaher, a large industrial consumer products company, which regarded Pantone as a jewel in its portfolio. Pantone had been in business for just over fifty years, and it was trying to figure out how to reposition itself for the future.

  Pantone and Danaher both recognized (sadly) that print is a dying medium, and Pantone, whose business had been built with a reliance on print media, was starting to ask itself what to do next. In the United States, it holds an overwhelmingly dominant market share in its category. Almost everyone who requires color matching uses Pantone to do so.

  But what does such a dominant market share mean in a declining category? If the pie is getting smaller every year, owning the whole thing matters less and less. Pantone’s executives knew they had better chart a new course, or in another fifty years there wouldn’t be a Pantone.

  I started the meeting with a straightforward question: “How do you describe what Pantone is?”

  Around the conference table every executive gave a version of the same answer: “We’re an ink-and-chemical company.”

  Several of my colleagues from our design department were with us. We were all big fans of the company, and we were excited to get to know it better. But every time we heard “ink-and-chemical company,” a little part of us died inside. We began sneaking quick “WTF?” looks at each other.

  Finally one of our design leads spoke up: “An ink-and-chemical company?”

  You see, to us Pantone is so much more than just ink and chemicals. It represents the integrity of design, the inspiration that comes from color, the universe of possibilities that creators can play with when developing a new campaign or product or brand.

  We could see immediately that the brand had lost the spirit of what it really represented. Those executives weren’t at fault; they were simply too inside their own company to see it the way we—the design community that relies on Pantone—see it. They’d lost the plot.

  We knew our job was to help the employees at this company get their mojo back. We needed to help them remember why they had started working there in the first place. They needed a new perspective from which they could see the company with fresh eyes. And empathy would help us get there together.

  A SPECTRUM DISORDER

  We began digging into all areas of the company, from messaging and marketing to products and services, business metrics, internal culture, and more. This is how we start to understand a business without “boiling the ocean” and taking on more information than we need. It’s important to build this sort of broad foundation because you never know where insights will emerge.

  We spoke to employees around the world, many of whom had worked at Pantone for most of their careers. This can be both a blessing and a curse. People with long tenures may understand the business really well and possess a sort of “tribal knowledge” of the unwritten, sometimes unspoken norms of the business. But long-tenured employees can also have difficulty being objective and seeing the business from an external perspective.

  The Danaher executives saw Pantone as the leader in the industry and an asset with potential for growth once the right plan was in place. But despite their enthusiasm, the team inside Pantone wasn’t as optimistic. Through conversations with employees and partners of the brand, we discovered that Pantone had become a bit unwieldy in recent years. In a drive for growth, some decisions had spread the company’s resources thin. It had built a licensing business, allowing partners to use the Pantone name and its iconic color swatches on consumer products. While that was a testament to the brand’s strength, some of the licensing choices had not been as strategic as others. A Pantone coffee mug? Sure. Most design studios have one or two sitting around, and that’s good. We discovered that it is one of the world’s best-selling coffee mugs. But a Pantone roll-aboard suitcase? Maybe not so much.

  We also began to understand the complexity of the company’s product business. We knew how important its color matching system was in the print world, but the company also offered color accuracy products for creators ranging from interior designers to fashion and product designers.

  The business is located in Carlstadt, New Jersey, along an unflattering piece of road abutting the Meadowlands (popularized on TV shows such as The Sopranos for its mobster-burying suitability). It is about a mile from my childhood home, and I know the area well. Only a ten-minute drive from Manhattan, it was still a world away and not at the epicenter of design culture. The location, a decidedly undesigner locale, also made recruitment and retention of top talent difficult.

  The offices were a dull, buttery beige. For a company so invested in and committed to color, it seemed particularly ironic.

  Those pieces of data, and others like them, were giving us a clearer picture of the real Pantone as well as a sense of where to begin our work. But we still didn’t fully understand one thing about the company. We kept hearing about the Pantone Color Institute (PCI). People talked about it in meetings as though it were a mysterious, Oz-like home for color wizards. We had trouble meeting with the Color Institute people early on in our process, as they were often traveling somewhere around the world doing research, but once we were able to sit down with them, our picture of Pantone got much clearer.

  AN EMERALD IN THE ROUGH

  The Pantone Color Institute is made up of color experts around the globe who regularly share insights and trends they uncover from their multiple fields. They are trend forecasters in the fields of interior, graphic, product, and fashion design, and they provide information about what they are seeing and what is happening globally with color. They analyze which colors are “in” and which are “out”—which colors are gaining favor in Prague and which ones people in Singapore are sick of seeing. These people are straight-up color whisperers.

  It was fascinating to see how that side of Pantone works. Our team was incredibly curious about the special sauce PCI cooks up, and we asked what the company does with all the research—how it shows up in the business. We quickly learned that much of the research goes into an annual color report that Pantone publishes and is also used to determine the “Color of the Year.”

  The Pantone Color of the Year is a pretty big deal. In the year we were working with them, 2013, Pantone was halfway through the year of “Emerald.” The Color Institute had determined, through research and conversation, that 2013 would be a big year for emerald green. And you know what, it was right. At the fashion shows that year, pops of vibrant green were seen walking up and down the catwalks. The packaging of consumer goods saw an uptick of this jewel-like color to grab attention from shoppers looking for a new toothbrush or disposable razor. The institute had nailed it.

  We were also happy to discover that the announcement of the Color of the Year was a huge media moment for the brand. News outlets and design blogs typically covered the announcement, praising the brand for its role in the creative community. The coverage is a big deal for an “ink-and-chemical company” based in the swamps of New Jersey.

  Our initial research had unearthed many of the company’s core elements and the ecosystem it had created. We found that about half the company’s resources went to running the color-matching and swatch book business. The other half was split across licensing, marketing, and communications, the PCI, and other smaller elements. The Color of the Year was somewhat of an outlier. It didn’t have a clear “owner” at the company because it ran throughout the whole company, with many departments contributing bits and pieces. It seemed odd to us that the most pressworthy part of the company occupied such a relatively small part of its mind share. Not to mention that everyone in the company, whether directly or indirectly, benefited from its being in the news.

  Our close look at the Color of the Year revealed Pantone’s savant gift. It was hiding right there in plain sight. The world saw it, but the company had become so locked into the day-to-day of its business that it hadn’t been able to see it.

  That was our way
in.

  We realized that the Color of the Year had more power than just being a great PR moment. Rather than being a single brick in the building, it was the mortar that could hold the company together and give it the foundation Danaher was seeking.

  The Color of the Year is Applied Empathy in action. Pantone gathers its understanding of the world around it from its customers and its own internal knowledge and uses that to present a fresh perspective on the core of its business: color. It just didn’t realize it was doing that.

  VISUALIZING THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

  We started to think about amplifying the company’s authority in the area of color intelligence. As in building a house, the most important thing is having a strong foundation. We began our work with the parent brand itself.

  Pantone had used the same, straightforward logotype mark for years. It is recognizable and has a legacy we wanted to hold on to, yet we wanted to find a way to breathe new life into the brand. We suggested that if the company wanted its brand to stand for something new, an update to the brand identity would be a powerful signal that the company was undergoing an evolution.

  A few weeks later, we landed on something that felt like a natural evolution; it maintained what was working, while adding something new. We kept their iconic logo but surrounded it with the outline of the Pantone swatch, placing the company’s logotype inside its most recognizable symbol. We added a tagline that consumers could understand in an instant. It communicated what Pantone is here to do: Make it Brilliant.

  MAKE IT BRILLIANT

  “Make it Brilliant” refers not only to the company’s legacy as color experts, but also to the importance of color intelligence and forecasting in its growth plan. The Sub Rosa and Pantone teams agreed that the company would have to be more than an ink-and-chemical company if it hoped to grow in the years ahead. Our work to understand the company had uncovered a clear path to the expanding of its color intelligence business.

  We worked together to make the color intelligence side of the business—the insights of the experts at the Pantone Color Institute—a new year-round color intelligence business that bolstered the color matching services the company already offered. It was now monetizing these valuable data points by using them to advise other companies that wanted to make better, more informed color choices.

  You might be wondering how this plays out in practice. Let’s say you are part of the product design team at the Ford Motor Company. You’re preparing to launch a new minivan, and you’d like to target young Millennial families. The colors of the car’s exterior and interior are informed by your own research. But what if that research could be bolstered by data from the world’s most renowned color experts? What if Pantone could help you see that a subtle shift in the hue of a particular color could have an impact on whether Millennial customers decide to buy the minivan? Those were the sort of powerful insights that Pantone wasn’t yet monetizing but would ultimately turn into a major component of its growth plan.

  The gathering of color intelligence was already a Pantone “ritual,” and by applying empathy for the world of color, we helped the company turn it into something much more meaningful and momentous for the brand, which led it to develop a new reality.

  TURNING A WEEK INTO A YEAR

  Shortly after we created the “Make it Brilliant” brand positioning, it was time for Pantone to announce the new color of the year, and the team asked us to help them build a more empathic campaign than they’d had in years past.

  The Color of the Year campaign had historically been produced on a shoestring budget. For Emerald Green, the company had used nothing more than an iconic photo of an actual emerald, set on a green background. It had milked that photo like crazy; it was on its website, on signs at trade shows, and glimmering on banner ads and social media posts. That worked okay at first, but even the finest of gemstones lose their luster, and after six months, everyone was sick of the photo but the campaign still had six more months to go.

  The next year’s color was Radiant Orchid, and our job was to “Make it Brilliant” with an inventive, empathic way of rolling out this new color and keeping it fresh for twelve months. Oh, and this strategy wasn’t fully proven yet to Danaher, which meant we’d need to stay on a relatively shoestring budget until we had a couple wins to our credit.

  We saw that Pantone’s social channels were overrun with repetitive photos of that damn emerald interspersed with dry and unengaging posts that focused too much on encouraging followers to purchase new swatch books. Our research as well as our perspective on the brand told us that there were consumers out there who were desperate to interact with the brand in a more meaningful way but were not getting anything of real substance from Pantone. We began to think about doing a campaign of this scale in one studio day—all that the budget would allow—that would extend an original content story over the course of a year. We knew it would need to engage the design community and show it that Pantone was now doing things differently.

  Applying empathy, we put ourselves into the perspective of the entire design community (designers, decorators, architects, and so on)—not such a stretch for a shop like ours but an important step to ensure that we were seeing the matter from all angles. We challenged ourselves to consider surprising ways Pantone could show up in the world while still being true to its brand. At the same time, we noted how often the world of design changes seasonally. Then the kernel of an idea began to emerge. We were homing in on a calendar.

  With the company putting things such as color and design at the front of the conversation, we knew it had plenty of topical and timely things to say each month. But to fill a year of communications, we needed ways for it to utilize key cultural moments throughout the calendar year to bring its distinctive personality to life.

  For Halloween and Thanksgiving, we had the expected images of people going trick-or-treating dressed as an orchid or a dinner table with a purple-hued turkey as the centerpiece. But that wasn’t interesting enough for the creative community. The concept needed to be pushed further. We explored the strange and eccentric holidays very few of us celebrate that are quirky and playful—just like the spirit of the Pantone brand itself. Holidays such as National Squirrel Day (January 21) and Ice Cream Month (July) were just some of the ones we came upon, but if we were to fill out 365 days of content in only one studio day, we needed to get really creative.

  We’d need to keep our shot list to a maximum of twelve setups in order to get the photo shoot done in one day. “Well, there are twelve months in a year,” our design director acknowledged with a smirk. “What if we shot a single vignette for each month and cropped in different pieces depending on the content we need?”

  And that’s exactly what we did. We orchestrated complex vignettes for each month, made up of props and people celebrating various holidays and activities specific to that month. Pantone’s social team could feed out different crops from the same photo over roughly thirty days and reveal the full vignette at the end of the month.

  The content we put together was topical, idiosyncratic, and engaging. Some of it was funny, other times academic, but it was always on brand and never short on its use of Radiant Orchid to bring the imagery to life through the Color of the Year. A few weeks later, Pantone’s Color of the Year was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and our campaign was off to a great start.

  The content we created led people to share their own “orchid moments,” and it wasn’t long before conversations and content were spreading all over the website. Pantone’s social team was smiling from ear to ear because both sides—the folks at Pantone and their consumers—were finally understanding each other.

  At the same time, the “Make it Brilliant” work was sparking new conversations, behaviors, relationships, and memories in all kinds of ways. The B2B community was appreciating the full value of Pantone’s expertise in color and trend forecasting, which had already led to increased sales of the company’s products and services. Th
ose customers realized that the Pantone they had known and trusted over the years now had much more to offer. Predicated on that trust, they were willing to expand their relationship into the company’s new offerings in color intelligence.

  All of that new engagement and growth was bringing about a “perfect storm” of success that simultaneously enlivened the spirit of the internal culture. Over the next months, Pantone continued to see upticks in engagement, social media followership, sales, and, perhaps most exciting, team morale. With all of that work in motion, it was high time for us to make a trip back to Carlstadt.

  We were blown away the minute we walked through the door and saw big printouts of the Color of the Year campaign we had produced with the company. As we were led through the main floor, we saw that more colorful printouts from the new brand book we had created were hanging on the cubicle walls. Pops of color were emerging everywhere like wildflowers in springtime.

  In the conference room, we met with the same executives who only six months earlier had called Pantone an “ink-and-chemical company.” Now they were beaming, asking each other things such as “Is this ‘brilliant’ enough?” and “How can we inspire more people with color?” Those of us from team Sub Rosa were giving one another subtle but proud head nods, realizing that we’d helped the company discover its innate gifts and ritualize some of the key behaviors and language into something that felt authentic and powerful.