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 Industry: Home Improvement Solution: Product Configurators  Challenge:
Best Practices:
Behr (A Masco company) is one of the top paint suppliers in North America and the world's fastest growing paint company. Behr produces coatings such as paint, stains, and varnishes that are sold primarily through home center chains, like The Home Depot. In partnership with The Home Depot, Behr has been working to bring both a new look and technology to Home Depot’s paint department - paint is one of the biggest categories for Home Depot. In late 2002, the Interactive Marketing group at Behr initiated a trial visualization project, named “ColorSmart”, to help in-store customers with their color selection. The goal was to provide consumers with an easy-to-use, ‘point and click’ kiosk-based application in the retail environment that allowed customers to pick colors and experiment with recommended coordinating colors in photo-realistic room scenes. Their key objective was to help improve the overall in-store buying experience for customers, allowing them to make a much faster purchase decision, with satisfying results. In solving this visualization problem, Behr hoped to increase paint sales, shorten the selling cycle in-store, and reduce customer purchase anxiety, promoting sales and customer satisfaction. Utilizing Scene7’s Infinite Imaging™ Platform, Behr began a 6-week pilot of the kiosk-based ColorSmart application in 3 Home Depot stores. The Linux/PC-based kiosk application lets customers choose colors and apply them to walls and ceilings in photo-real room scenes. In addition, it recommends other coordinating colors and sheens, provides lightening or darkening of color tones, and then allows customers to print out the results to bring to a Home Depot sales associate. The application lets customers experiment with paint products in millions of combinations – in real-time. All visuals both on the monitor and printer are color-calibrated to achieve accurate photo renderings. The kiosk currently features Behr’s Premium Plus paint brand, which is sold exclusively through Home Depot stores with over 4000 colors, 5 interior rooms and 5 exterior rooms. Behr plans to continually update from this baseline with new rooms, alternative lines and products, including stain and faux finishing programs. Results: The 6-week pilot produced results far exceeding expectations – recommended paint coordinates were tracked to purchase. They proved out that paint customers (and in-store staff) not only used the kiosk but enjoyed it! Most importantly, customers were purchasing recommended paints as specified by the application. As a result, Behr is now rolling out the kiosk application to all Home Depot stores in North America (approximately 1,500 stores). Behr has also launched a web-based ColorSmart application that allows customers to research color selections from home and print out visual summaries to take into their local Home Depot store. "Scene7 offers exceptional visualization technology for our ColorSmart by BEHR™ kiosk application. Our goal with The Home Depot is to help improve the overall in-store buying experience for consumers, thus making the paint selection process easier and faster by enabling them to make confident color selections for their home decorating projects," said Mary Rice, Vice President Marketing, BEHR Paints. "Initial consumer reaction is positive and encouraging based on trends we've seen due to the launch of the new Color Solutions Centers in The Home Depot stores." To Clients Overview  |
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