This is the last post answering Q1, "Can you tell me a little about the history of the use of color in marketing? How far back does it go?" from AllBusiness.com's Chris Bjorklund interviewing me on NextStage's five year study of the best uses of colors, color imagery and color iconography in marketing. This study contained NextStage original research and research from others.
The posts in this arc provide content that didn't make it into the podcast, just as the podcast has content that isn't provided in this arc. You can hear the entire podcast at The Best Way to Use Color and Imagery to Improve Your Marketing. I'll be including a bibliography in the last post in this arc.
I started to answer "Can you tell me a little about the history of the use of color in marketing? How far back does it go?" with Evolutionary Biology, suggesting that the origins of marketing are in the animal world, then going into how humans borrowed marketing concepts from their animal cousins. In part 3 of this arc I gave an example of using color to demonstrate what a company does. We continue from there.
Now let’s up the timeline to Gutenberg, printing, color printing, tv, color tv, movies and finally color cinema.Color is so essential, so culture specific, so industry specific, so gender and age specific that Asian color palettes won’t sell American products and vice versa, Nigerian color palettes won’t sell Scandanavian products and vice versa, male color palettes won’t sell to women, over-50yo color palettes won’t sell to teenagers, …
But everything goes back to finding mates, watching for predators and evaluating prey. One of the most interesting ways this fell out (for us) was recognizing the presence of what’s called “koinophilia” – what you can think of as “survival of the prettiest” in marketing. We can identify what models and what coloring to use on those models if you want to sell something now versus in the future and to which gender. It’s remarkable stuff, really.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Links for this post:
- The AllBusiness.com's Chris Bjorklund Interviews Joseph Carrabis on Color Use in Marketing arc
- The Best Way to Use Color and Imagery to Improve Your Marketing
- IMedia Brand Summit on 9-12 Sept 07
- XChange on 20-21 Sept 07
- DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
- Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.
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