TL; DR

60+ years after its founding, Pantone is a global behemoth in color systems and beyond.

But it didn't all happen at once. Its evolution reflects many aspects of doing credible innovation work.

The story

The announcement of Pantone's color of the year ("Mocha Mousse," 17-1230) got NPR journalist Emma Bowman to write a brief but insightful history of the company and its rise to dominance:

Lawrence Herbert, a part-time employee of what was then a commercial printing company kept experiencing customers' struggles to describe colors accurately when they asked for print jobs.

It took time, but by 1963, Herbert had developed the Pantone Matching System (or PMS), as a way to standardize color descriptions. From there, with strong marketing and new products for different industries and uses, the company thrived. By now, trademarked colors like Tiffany blue follow the company's system.

And it's not just branding anymore. The company's solutions provide serious practical value. And people are willing to pay for it.

Go and read the story. It's not that long and has many fascinating tidbits!

[Source: National Public Radio (NPR).]

The point for doing credible innovation work

A series of relevant points

But back to innovation and us:

The Pantone story doesn't just teach one lesson. It holds many. Here are a few that stood out to me. In short:

  • Start with a real problem for real users
  • Consider alternate users and use cases
  • Innovation is rarely a completely new invention
  • There are only four ways to win

Let's look at them one at a time:

Start with a real problem for real users

"Nobody wants our product, and nobody will ever want our product," as Rob Snyder from Harvard's Innovation Labs says. Instead people we must ask what "specific project [people] are trying to accomplish, and how our product could help them accomplish it better than their alternative options".

That's what happened at Pantone: Real people were asking for real print projects and struggled to get good results from their current alternative option, namely coming up with color descriptions themselves. Before the PMS, Pantone's "famous thing was – cut a piece off [customers'] tie and sent it into the print and say, match this color," per NPR. A terrible work-around that Pantone helped people to avoid.

👉 Go out into your world. Learn about people's real projects. Find out how they struggle to complete them. Only then find ways to solve that.

Consider alternate users and use cases

As Frank Mattes, author of NOW and NEW and Lean Scaleup points out, companies struggle to evolve if they define themselves by the products they already make, rather than the outcomes that they produce.

Pantone did not make that mistake. It did not stick with one solution. When clients "across a range of industries" asked for help with uniform colors, Pantone adapted. But it also stuck to the core outcome that their produce, i.e., with their core focus on uniform colors but developing solutions for materials for different materials and industries.

This was purposeful. NPR cites a Pantone executive who points out explicitly that Pantone's founder " understood, if this is an issue going on in print, this is an issue that goes through many other different industries".

👉 The same applies to you: The first user group whom you find to have a problem with their project may not be the best one, nor the only one for you. So consider them all and just be thoughtful to stick with the core of your company's soul, even if you define it based on outcomes, not products.

Innovation is rarely a completely new invention

Emma Bowman points out in her story for NPR that color "systems date back to at least the 17th century," with several iterations along the way.

In other words, the need (color uniformity) is one that humans have had for a long time. There was no obvious "good-enough" solution instantly available. So innovations have gotten ever better at meeting that need and reducing remaining user friction.

👉 Credible innovators don't obsess over "never-seen-before" moonshot solutions. If there has never been anything like your "thing," people will (at best) take a long time to understand why they need it. In other words, market maturity will be way far in the future, even if you can generate it. A better way is to check whether your solution achieves something better that humans have done for a long time. You might look far to the past. E.g., AI-driven robot retailers that bring shopping to your house are nothing but far more advanced tinkers and peddlers who sold solutions door-to-door for centuries.

There are only four ways to win

👉 In the end, you can only win by:

  • Being better: At something specific, to someone specific
  • Keeping competitors out: Erecting barriers that matter
  • Keeping up in a growth market: Where you don't need to "win." There's more than enough demand for all. You just must be a credible competitor who can keep up
  • Out-smarting competitors: Where you aren't "better" but (legally and ethically) beat others who overlooked ways to win that are theoretically available to all

Pantone has developed such a strong brand and related solution system that many users will pay for using their solutions rather than free (or cheaper) competitors. Others can have color systems too. But only Pantone has Pantone colors. It's not the fact that it's copyrighted that keeps people out. It's the fact that what's copyrighted is what actually matters to users.

T.I.S.C.

Footnotes

Original stories

Further reading

Credits

Photo "Pantone color swatches in a field" by Taylor Heery on Unsplash

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