From Investor’s Business Daily article “Color Me Verizon Red, T-Mobile Pink And…”
Color is the “silent salesperson,” Eiseman said. At the very least, color should create enough interest or curiosity to induce would-be buyers to find out more about a product or service, she says.
“They say a product unseen is unsold, and the same thing goes to brand logo and identification,” Eiseman said. “You have to have attention drawn to you.”
If your color comes too close to a rival’s, consumers confuse brands, Eiseman says. Worse, if a new or minor brand takes on a color close to the industry leader’s, it’s perceived as a copy, “and that is not a good connotation,” she said.
That won’t be a problem for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Zune portable media/music player, which was launched in mid-November. To go up against Apple’s (AAPL) iconic iPod, which comes in a host of bright colors, Microsoft went the opposite way. It chose brown as the central brand color, though some of its devices come in black and white.
“Certainly a color like brown in this category and in technology overall is a new, bold step,” said Steve Kaneko, Zune’s design director, who acknowledges that the move was risky. Amid all the bright and shiny tech devices on the market, brown stands out as “warm and friendly,” he said.
“People might ask, ‘Who in their right mind would produce a brown technology product?’ ” Kaneko said. Artists would, musicians would, he says. “It’s a color that makes you feel music. I think about it as an incredibly nice acoustic classical guitar.”
Brown, once nondescript, has been “repositioned,” Bredenfoerder said. It’s moved from ordinary to “grounded and stable,” a color of “sustainability.” Zune’s brown has let Microsoft find a niche in an important new trend, he adds.
Eiseman says Microsoft might have gone too far. Brown is great for UPS, (UPS) which aims to convey its down-to-earth reliability, she says. But if Microsoft wants to lure a youthful customer, brown isn’t right, she says.
“If you’re the first guys on the market, you can do anything, but not after you have a competitor that has done sensational things,” Eiseman said.
