Dive Brief:

• Behr Paint is seeking to hire a "Color Explorer," according to a press release shared with Marketing Dive. One person will be awarded travel costs plus a $10,000 stipend to search across the U.S. and Canada for inspiration to create and name new paint colors. Applicants must submit an essay of 150 words or less about the color that inspires them by Wednesday, May 15.
• The winner will have the opportunity to kayak in Banff, Alberta, and attend a music festival in Charleston, South Carolina, among other adventures. The Color Explorer will share photos and field notes on social media and on Behr's blog at each destination before naming new colors with the brand's Color Marketing team in Orange County, California.
• "We're not only giving the individual the tools and resources to find, experience and cultivate color, but also showing them how to creatively think about each color they find and their stories from our brand's perspective," Behr Paint CMO Jodi Allen said in the press release.

Dive Insight:

As brands try to generate social media buzz, many of them face one insurmountable fact: not all brands are, by themselves, interesting or compelling. Behr is addressing this handicap by coming up with a social media-minded campaign, seeking a "Color Explorer" that will search for Instagrammable colors across North America.

The Color Explorer's journey is also a riff on the experiential activations that brands have used to connect with millennial audiences, albeit on a smaller, personal scale. For a majority (72%) of millennial women, spending on experiences makes them the happiest, with 54% saying experiences will drive their biggest purchases in the next year, according to research by Merkle and Levo. Experiences have driven recent campaigns by brands like Marriott and YSL, among others.

Additionally, the Color Explorer campaign will allow Behr to get in on the trend of user-generated content (UGC) in marketing, which has been found to drive more engagement in certain contexts. By sharing the winner's photos and field notes on social media and its blog, Behr can join brands like Crayola, Vogue and Aerie that use or mimic UGC to make more authentic connections with consumers.

This is not the paint brand's first creative workaround to having what is perhaps an unsexy brand. In 2017, Behr revealed its first "color of the year" — a muted blue-green — in a pop-up display in New York City's Grand Central Station. Also included at the installation were Behr Color Trends VR cardboard headsets displaying a 360-degree video that enabled exploration of its 20 new paint colors.