A stroke of marketing genius from painter

By Bill Hendrick

For the AJC

What’s in a name?

Ask Coca-Cola. Or Nestle USA, maker of Lean Cuisine. Or Procter & Gamble, which sells NyQuil.

Or you could ask Albert McDonald, 38, head roller and owner of Overeducated Painters, who decided to capitalize on his marketing savvy to bring in the gravy.

McDonald is a house painter, though it wasn’t his first choice. After graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in finance, he landed and lost a series of jobs, eventually landing in Atlanta with Kodak.

But with film giving way to digital, Kodak started lopping off heads, including McDonald’s. Rather than seek work with another company, he decided, “Enough already!”

“I realized I could only count on myself. I got tired of going to networking events and handing out business cards to others looking for jobs.”

One day, somebody said, “Do you know any painters? And I said, ‘I’m pretty handy, I need the money, let me do it.’ ”

His first job paid $450, his next more than twice that.

“You do good work, concentrate on the details, be good to your customers, and word gets around. We did the ballroom at the Atlanta History Center. We did the Margaret Mitchell House. You market by word of mouth.”

His degree told him a clever company name might help. It didn’t take much head-scratching to come up with Overeducated Painters, which is “easy to remember and evokes a story.”

Anthony Pratkanis, a professor at the University of California and a marketing expert, said McDonald’s choice was brilliant.

“He is positioning himself against the stereotype that painters are not skilled or educated,” Pratkanis said. He added, “For the record, I was a painter myself, that’s how I paid for college, and ... most of the people I worked with were talented and smart.”

McDonald, who wants to franchise the moniker, gets some jobs from people who see it on his FJ Cruiser and call out of the blue.

“I did a lot of marketing in the corporate world,” McDonald said. “Names mean something.”