We're now on Q3, "Companies spend millions of dollars developing their brands and logos and the colors to go with them. Have you seen some examples of big and costly mistakes?", from AllBusiness.com's Chris Bjorklund. Ms. Bjorklund interviewed 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.
Yes, interestingly enough one of our researchers found an online list of products that didn’t make it for a variety of reasons (Stonewall's Findings: Tech Naming Failures). What often happens is that marketing decides something “will ship and will be a success” and doesn’t do enough homework to figure out if the market really exists for the product or not. The Segway, for example. It didn’t matter what color you painted it, nobody was going to simply go out and get one. The Apple Newton is another example. Products must fill a need, either real or imagined, in the consumer’s mind. Great examples come from the automotive world.The Jummer, for example, is what I've heard people call the Jeep Commander because it’s a Jeep that looks like the Hummer so as to capture that market. GM’s problem was that they got rid of one of the most popular and reliable products on the road, the Jeep Cherokee Sport, replaced it with the Jeep Liberty, pushed it at the Cherokee audience which thought the Liberty was a joke and have been coming out with different models playing catch up ever since. The latest is the Patriot and it pretty much looks like what a Cherokee Sport would look like if automotive evolution had been allowed to fulfill its course.
Again, marketing, the use of color and color iconography has models in evolution and biology. Here we’re seeing animals that evolve to fill a biological niche, only the animal that’s evolving is a GM product to fill the niche created by the extinction of the Cherokee.
(more to follow)
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
- Usability Studies 101: Follow the Eye
- 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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