BRIEF

In its second year of launch, we were tasked with continuing to drive mass awareness and consideration of the Dulux Heritage range with painters & decorators. Positioning it as the only range that delivers both desirable colours in luxury finishes that consumers can’t help but want, as well as a range that decorators want to ‘sell’ with pride.

Our campaign was built on two clear insights:

1. HUMAN TRUTH: Labour now and in the future is the number one concern raised by decorators and contractor and the UK decorating population is in decline. 66% of UK decorators will retire within 10 years and the average age of a decorator is 50.

2. PRODUCT TRUTH: The Premium Aesthetics category has grown significantly over the past 12 months, particularly in trade channels (via specialist decorating merchants to painting professionals or homeowners), but is largely dominated by competitor brands.

We needed to establish a campaign with a difference, that went beyond a linear brand message and instead put the trade in the spotlight. We wanted to open up a conversation with our painting & decorating audience by encouraging a discussion around...

Shared personal experiences and how they entered the industry

the market’s labour shortage how quality brands help to deliver quality projects for their customers to build their own reputations and profiles

TWO KEY PILLARS TO THE CAMPAIGN -------

1. Peer-to-peer storytelling and product in practice showcasing to build credible and reliable advocacy. Using the power of peer-to-peer endorsement, we entered a long-term strategic partnership with three painters & decorators – our Dulux Heritage Heroes – to show (not tell) our audiences why they should be proud to recommend Dulux Heritage to their customers.

Message authenticity throughout was vital. It was important that we partnered with painters & decorators that truly held an affinity for the brand. The trade can be incredibly sceptical of the use of trade influencers and branded partnerships – they see straight through any content that is clearly based on a commercial relationship. We needed depth of message and a group of passionate individuals who are obsessed with their vocation and focus on quality finish and delivery for their clients.

We couldn’t have found a more perfect trio. Our influencers were huge advocates for storytelling and regularly use their own social channels to promote their personal brands. Not only did they break the mould of the ‘average’ UK painter & decorator, they were passionate about promoting the trade and obsessed with quality and sharing their experiences. They also frequently use Dulux Heritage and we were able to identify them in our screening process really quickly due to their positive sentiment for the brand. This allowed us to leverage their real, trusted voices to demonstrate the product benefits and superior credentials of Dulux Heritage via a dedicated earned, owned and paid strategy.

Our Heritage Heroes were: Justin Bailly (aka JBTV with 17.5k YouTube subscribers), Kevin Tingley (aka The Paint Warrior with a whopping 695.8k TikTok followers, 139k Instagram followers and 156K followers on Facebook) and Lee Boxall (aka LB Painting & Decorating with 55.6k TikTok followers).

We instigated a content series with the trio, with unscripted raw commentary packaged up and shared amongst our Craft Applier audience via their social channels and Dulux’s owned trade social channels.

2. A national search for our next Heritage Hero. The word Heritage is intrinsically linked to stories and experiences from the past that make up the present. Linking authentically to our ‘Promote the Profession’ campaign, we used the power of storytelling to launch a national search to find our next Dulux Heritage Hero. The next hero would join our Heritage Heroes line-up for next year and would also receive a professional photoshoot and key Dulux Heritage products.

Our Heritage Heroes kick-started the search by sharing their own experiences that have shaped their approach to life and their craft, with content pushed out across their own social channels.

We utilised optimised cut-downs of the content to share across Dulux Trade’s channels via reels, Instagram Stories and Dulux Trade’s dedicated Facebook channel.

We brought our Heritage Heroes together for a mini-series on the Dulux Trade YouTube channel. We created three x 3-minute episodes where they discussed what matters to them – paint durability, customer demand and colour trends they are seeing.

We created a longer form edit for use on the AkzoNobel (parent company) YouTube channel and linked via Dulux Trade Instagram bio.

We issued an earned media news story, which included links to the Heritage Heroes videos to drive further visibility.

The earned outreach was supported by a wave of paid advertising placements to promote the national competition, which also went out as a newsletter to Dulux Trade’s database.