Brand Matters: The Language of Color
By Robert C. Sprung and Christian Wichmann- TippingSprung LLC
Color choice is increasingly critical in the branding of beauty products. As U.S. products are sold internationally, we must ask whether the colors we are choosing are effective and nonoffensive in our target markets. A prior Brand Matters column in CPC Packaging's September 2004 issue dealt with the legal protectibility of color and scent.
We have heard horror stories about missteps in color selection from abroad—for example, that a company marketing products in the Chinese market didn't know that "white is the color of death in China." But some of these stories can be misleading or wrong. Packaging professionals should delve deeper into researching color selection for international markets, since so much of their companies' revenue and prestige rides on these decisions.
Colors often do have distinct associations in different countries. In much of the West, red connotes anger or danger—the global list of such associations would cover many pages. Since color is used as a design element in every society, a single color, out of context, may well lose much of that elemental significance. However, certain color combinations are much less ambiguous. For example, the combination of white and red is associated with weddings and celebrations in Japan, while black and white together is associated with funerals. A Japanese marketer tells us that companies avoid printing logos in black and white in Japan for this reason.
Perhaps the strongest regional color associations are flags and other national colors. One should be especially careful in regions of the world with strong national rivalries or animosity. For example, the two factions in the Irish conflict are strongly associated with green and orange.
Some companies have played these associations to their advantage—witness Ikea's yellow and blue, the Swedish national colors. America's red, white, and blue are ubiquitous, but in today's troubled world, those colors may not play well, or imply a truly international approach.
Beyond such fixed color associations, there is an ever-changing cultural backdrop that affects how colors are perceived. Purple, traditionally the color of nobility in Japan, has today become associated with the "punk" youth culture and presents a strongly negative image in certain market segments.
Despite all these caveats, one can counter that branding is all about standing apart. UPS "owns" brown and T-Mobile magenta, just as Tiffany is strongly associated with "Tiffany blue." The branding world is filled with stories of companies that laid claim to a color not staked out by the competition.
The lesson is that there is no simple color map or decision tree to determine which colors work or don't work in a given market. However, these color issues are very real, and there is no substitute for natives testing them in a structured manner in your target markets. A final word of advice—take the input of a single person with a grain of salt; for decisions on products with wide distribution, ensure that you have good data from a wide range of consumers, polled in a scientifically robust manner.
Robert Sprung, CEO, and Christian Wichmann, are from TippingSprung, which offers brand strategy, naming, design, research, translation, and cross- cultural services. Sprung can be reached at robert@tippingsprung.com.