The bucket and the beat by Michael Fallarino

Selling Vibrations:
Old School v. New School (Part One of Two)

Question: What is it that you can’t smell, taste, touch, or hear but can sense and affects you constantly? Clue: It’s something that you can sell and your customers can apply to their environment to affect emotions and health. Give up? It’s color.

Okay, so your customers may not exactly be thinking in terms of "buying color" — but — they should. Because in a sense, paints and stains — important as they are — become static films, whereas color is a continual and dynamic energetic process reflected by the applied film. Paint is an object that lies on a surface. B-O-R-I-N-G. But color is a transmission that permeates the environment. It comes out to greet you and, well, this is getting a little personal, but it gets inside of you.

Old school thinking was all about maintaining the status quo. White outside, beige inside. Let’s face it, how many times have you had dinner guests over and wondered why they seemed to be getting drowsy so early in the evening? Believe me, it wasn’t the extra drink or the thick frosting on the cake that put ‘em down before their time. And no you didn’t talk too much. It was those darn bugaboo beige walls creating gas and stagnation in their digestive tract.

The fear that bold color schemes can evoke or the stagnation that banal color schemes can cause doesn’t come from the color. Color is inert. But as color is perceived by color sensitive beings (some species of animals are naturally color blind) the process of vision (which is really a whole body phenomenon and not a micro-process limited to the functioning of the eyeballs) creates a complex reaction. Part of that reaction is mechanical, part is chemical, and part is hormonal. The sum total of these also affects emotions, but emotions are partly a response of our learning and inner balance (or imbalance) and well, I better stop there.

The main point is that a particular color deployment can be good or bad for home or business. There are color combinations that can increase ill health and absenteeism, and there are harmonious combinations for commerce that can increase productivity.

Let’s start from here: perhaps we could call the passive use of color the old school of status quo color use (TOSSCU) and the active use of color the new school of contemporary wavelength deployment (TNSCWD). You want to convince your customers that paints and stains aren’t just something that they see; coatings are highly economical ways to optimize functioning. Out with seeing and in with sensing. Got it? We don’t just want a paint consultant behind the counter who is competent at dispensing pigments. We want to engage your customers and have them ask for help from a certified wavelength deployment clinician.

And then there’s the whole angle of exterior colors and how those choices function in the neighborhood. Hey look, the overwhelming majority of the time we’re inside our homes and it’s the 40-something neighbor across the street who’s wrestling with the start of macular degeneration by looking at all those brilliant white facades*. So why not propose to your customers that they rent the colors on the outside of their homes to the neighbors across the street? Think of the sales buzz you could get going with that one!

Bottom Line: There’s really only one thing wrong with the world and it has fueled human delusion and religious conflicts throughout the ages: people keep using color the wrong way.

* No disrespect is implied to anyone who has been touched by this seriously troubling epidemic.

Next month: how to convince your customers that what they are looking at on their walls is definitely wrong for them and why it would be patriotic to repaint as quickly as possible. [August 2002]

©2002 Michael Fallarino/Pan-Global Gumbo SM, Ltd.