Telhanorte Social Wall
SUMMARY: ON BLANK CANVAS AND POSSIBILITIES
“I’ve always wanted to be able to paint the dawn, but in the old days one never could. It would be too dark to see the paints; or else, if you turned on a light you’d lose the subtle gathering tones of the coming sun. But with an iPhone, I just turn it on, start mixing and matching the colors, laying in the evolving scene.”
– David Hockney
Why would a 72-year-old painter change his brush for his fingers? Because the iPhone allowed David Hockney to paint something he had never been able to until then.
This story translates the best meaning of a canvas: a surface inviting people to come up with ideas.
This case is about how Telhanorte, Brazil’s largest building materials retailer, created a new (and simple) product that invited people to come up with interesting ideas for their homes. It is also about how the way people connect with the social networks helped them see these possibilities, and the importance this had to a hardly exciting category.
THE DULL PART OF A COOL PROCESS
Getting started on a new home or a new space is always an adventure surrounded by cool things.
People walk around a décor store as if they were walking around an exhibition room. They are there to shop, but that’s not what pleases them the most: shopping is the mere result of an imagination process that is triggered once they step into the store. What makes them like these stores is the fact they can get inspiration as they picture their lives in a new home, a home all their own.
The process of building a new home involves the home improvement stores, like Telhanorte. As it happens, though, in Brazil these stores are hardly perceived as inspirational. For Brazilians, the thought of home improvement stores readily conjures dull things like bricks and cement. The category cannot be said to help people picture their home ready.
It is fair to say that, for being a store operating in such building materials segment, Telhanorte is perceived by people as an interruption in the cool feeling they get from building their home.
The fact is when someone is shopping for bricks, tile grout and mortar, their goal is to take home a decent product for the best price possible so that they will end up with more money left for a nice sofa.
Whereas décor stores represent the inspiration, building materials stores represent the dull part of this equation.
ON BEING DULL AND BEING COOL.
To be fair, the category as a whole has even tried to move closer to the cooler part of this process.
The first solution the category found was to use the social networks to offer décor tips. To little effect. You cannot pretend to be cool by replicating the cool factor from another category.
Therefore, the first strategic decision we took was to pursue a new path: instead of looking outside, it made more sense to look within to find inspiration. If talking about other cool things was not helping, Telhanorte then needed to do something genuinely interesting.
This meant moving from being a reproducer — one that only replicates references, only resells products — to being a producer. A producer of inspiration.
Telhanorte could create a product all its own, one of the products it already sells, only made by Telhanorte itself.
But a cool product alone would not suffice: it had to create a feeling in people that home improvement stores usually didn’t — the fun of picturing their new home and making this new home all their own.
Our task was then to find out what triggered such feeling in people. We looked at people’s relationship with the building process, but we also went beyond that.
A CANVAS OF CEMENT AND BRICKS
Imagine someone building their home.
As this home takes shape, it reveals blank spaces that look like they’re asking to be filled. And that’s what building is about: the endless exercise of creating blank spaces and coming up with ideas to fill them.
Now let’s consider the definition of canvas that we learned from David Hockney and try to imagine the creative old man painting with his iPhone. The finding of how homes are shaped revealed to us a truth that was hidden, maybe forsaken: people’s homes are nothing more than a canvas. The entire home is a canvas.
While building materials may look dull and drab , they are actually the first version of that canvas. Building materials are the foundation for a wall, which is the foundation for the paint, which is the foundation for the color of the sofa, which is the foundation for the home décor, which is the foundation for how the owners will entertain their guests, which is the foundation for the stories they will live in that place.
The more people saw their homes as a canvas right from the start, the more they would like Telhanorte and what it does for people.
In what other contexts do people use that same perspective, apart from the building process?
A PIXEL CANVAS
Imagine someone building their Facebook wall.
People put a lot of their time into building their profile.
What are you thinking of? What do you like? Where are you? Who commented your photo? Who did you beat in Songpop? People don’t see these questions as requests for information. They actually see them as invitations to express their ideas in a new way, invitations for them to make their Facebook pages all their own.
Facebook is able to create in people the same feeling a canvas does.
If we were about to have people take interest in the dull and drab part of the home building process, we had to help them see their home walls the same way they see their Facebook walls.
A CANVAS OF TILES, FRIENDS AND MOMENTS
Establishing a genuine, concrete connection between Telhanorte and what happens on Facebook walls: this was a way to bring about the same cool feeling.
This is what led us to the strategic idea: to use Telhanorte’s expertise combined with Facebook’s logic to create a new product that helped people get inspired and make their homes all their own.
Social Wall
With a change in perspective, a cool technology and a little help from the social networks, Telhanorte turned one of its best sellers into a canvas. A thing that was ready to hold any idea people might have and were willing to hang up in their homes.
This is how the Social Wall was born. A technology to print tiles, linked with a Facebook app, which invites people to send in their own photos to be printed on a wall tile.
It works like this:
1. the user had an image that they thought would look great on a wall tile or a tile mural. This could be their friends’ faces or their children’s doodles.
2. they uploaded those photos to Facebook and the app pulled them up when the user logged on. Then all they had to do was to pick a photo and decide where it should be used.
3. Telhanorte printed the tiles and sent them to people’s homes. Each tile cost less than $5.
COOL RESULTS FOR EVERYONE
The new product allowed Telhanorte to create cool stuff for everyone.
It was cool for people: it was not the kind of product that people see and feel like buying only. It was more like the kind of product that people see and imagine all the different things they can do with it. A total of 28,000 people have already requested tiles for their Social Walls.
A cool result for a multi-brand store: Telhanorte was able to remain in its core business and, based on it, innovate and leave behind the dull and drab part of the segment.
A cool result for the agency: we developed a new product/service that became a source of income for the agency, as it had a 50% share on each tile sold.
The result of this story was a cool product at its face value, and even more so for the possibilities that it allows.
DDB Brasil 