From surface coating to a mindset about collaboration

The white wall challenge

As part of one of my building projects in early 2013, I was looking for simple white paint for office walls. Nothing fancy, nothing exotic and nothing that’d break the bank. I started wondering about the idea of saving money by getting certain surfaces to double as walls and whiteboards, and then by chance stumbled across a product called IdeaPaint.

Coating a surface or incubating an idea?

According to the company, IdeaPaint is a cost-effective, high-performance alternative to traditional whiteboards and dry-erase wall coverings. It’s also alleged to be LEED and CA-01350 compliant and the most environmentally responsible commercial dry-erase surface on the market.

IdeaPaint positions itself as the originator of high-performance dry-erase paint, claiming that this is a tool that has a profound impact on the process, experience and outcome of bringing ideas to life. It’s advanced chemistry, but profoundly low-tech.

Rethinking surfaces and what you can get out of them – and rethinking how you tell the story

Sassy self-awareness sells

The company is fully aware of its own “specialness”, and certainly doesn’t hide its light under a bushel. That alone is a refreshing attention-getter! IdeaPaint describes its story thus

An innovative real-world solution, IdeaPaint has brought the human element back to more than 75,000 offices, schools and homes around the world by simply getting people on their feet, working together and exploring their creativity wherever ideas happen.

Multifaceted positioning rethink

One of the key features of the IdeaPaint marketing effort is that the company has really rolled out the writing capabilities – no techno-descriptions or product introspection, but loads of punchy, evocative words that deposit memorable pictures in the mind’s eye.

The traditional office model kept the senior team in their ivory towers, while middle management worked independently in Cubicle-ville.

The art of Brainswarming™

Another is that IdeaPaint focuses steadfastly on what the product can do – unlike many techno-geek companies that revel in their product details. They even found and trademarked a term for the whole thing – Brainswarming™ – although by 2022 the name seemed to have disappeared.

From the viewpoint of the individual, IdeaPaint is marketed as a dry-erase paint that turns virtually any surface into an erasable canvas, giving you the space you need to collaborate, interact and fully explore your creativity. From the viewpoint of the organisation, IdeaPaint is presented as paint that helps companies collaborate more effectively, be more creative, and get to better results faster.

The people behind IdeaPaint seem to have come with a radical rethink not only of paint, but how it’s conceived, marketed and communicated about. It’s one of the most vibrant. bear-down-on-the-benefits approaches I’ve seen for a long time.