Remember the Paint-By-Number coloring books and canvases? I’m sure like me, you received at least a dozen of them over the years. And of course, they got progressively more detailed as you got older. But not only did these paint by number pictures give you something to do, it probably increased your artistic skills – at least some. Yes, I can color in the lines, no I cannot draw – so some is a very relative word.
Leap forward any amount of years you want to count since your last paint by number experience and imagine what the adult version would look like? Would it even be about painting?
Enter Ikea. Leave it to Ikea to continuously overcome consumer barriers with out-of-the-box (no pun intended) solutions that make it easy for consumers to tackle complicated ideas and assembly.
Ikea is best known for its put together furniture and of course its meatballs, but it also showed surprising ingenuity in a recent kitchen promotion in Canada that included in-store recipes to promote key kitchen gadgets and foods that were on special.
But because Ikea isn’t your ordinary big box store, you can imagine that their brand of modern design and merchandising made recipe cards something extraordinary and nothing like normal. Not only weren’t the recipe pads small cards, filled with gorgeous pictures, ingredient lists and detailed cooking instructions…these recipe cards weren’t even recipe cards at all. Or at least recipes cards as we know them today.
They were mind bending…and how-to altering.
They were “poster packs” of parchment paper with fill-in-the-blank, aka paint by number cooking instructions. Yes…how easy is that! No measuring cups, extra dishes and fractions. Just blank spaces to add ingredients. It was paint by number for adults, using food!
When you see the simplicity of adding ingredients in this illustrated format it makes so much sense…even though many of us could have never conceived the possibility of such an interesting use of context to create a recipe.
The reality is, today’s consumer thinks differently…in fact each consumer of every generation has always thought differently. It’s why products evolve and stories change.
When Henry Ford talked about making the Model T…he reimagined how people would get from Point A to Point B as a solution to their answer, what do you need? They said, “I need a faster horse.”
When Steve Jobs created the iPod, he reimagined how we could access our music in different environments on the go. We couldn’t have told him we wanted an iPod any more than we could have asked for the first car. It is difficult to ask for something that doesn’t exist, that we don’t know how to articulate.
What we can do is tell our own stories and listen to the stories of other people. Their stories give us clues about their lives, about who they are, what they do, how they live and what they need. If we listen to others, stories help connect us and help us understand each other. They also help us learn.
Paint-by-Number pictures have been around since the 1950’s. They were a collaboration of a paint company and a commercial artist. The paint-by-number picture has included detailed artworks and simple kids activity books, but each created pictures that told stories that each “painter” has been a part of.
We all have stories to tell, lessons to teach. The question is, can we continue to reimagine how to tell stories and teach each new generation so we can make lasting impacts and grow together? Just like Ikea reinvented the idea of a recipe how-to with a fill in the blank, cook by numbers, they created a new lasting story for their consumers.
Contact us today to talk about telling your brand story.
