Color opportunities.

Unexpected colors are generating excitement in enough different spheres to suggest a color opportunity window that many marketers would do well to look through. New York's Central Park is flagged with 23 miles of bright orange flags or "Gates." that are provocatively being called saffron. Thanks to unheard of amounts of rain, the brown hills of Southern California are actually green. The Philadelphia Flower Show, this country's largest, is featuring red, white and blue this year--colors that seem most unseemly as harbingers of spring. Victoria's Secret has introduced a whole new brand called "Pink," that not only features the color but also prints the name of the color across the tush of its pink fleece pajama bottoms. Young females are wearing these pink pants to classes as well as to bed and breakfast. Iraqi voters show pride in purple fingers. Middle-aged women are wearing red hats and flocking to "Red Hat" events all over the U.S.A. The shoes as well as the bags, scarves, and dresses on runways and in the stores are fuchsia, orchid, chartreuse, and yellow.

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Seeing the Christo Gates firsthand, I was impressed by the number of grins and photo ops they triggered. People strolling among them (by the thousands) seemed to be smiling at one another with an "Aren't we silly!" complicity. Besides the hype and smiles, the color power of the Gates offered visitors a Rorschach chance to free-associate about what they meant to them. People could see them as anything they wished--curtains, flags, clotheslines, dreams, pathways, puddings, breezes, sunsets, dancers, dreamers, happy thoughts, sad thoughts, laughs, tears, silliness, stillness, etc. etc. etc. The Rorschach aspect of the display is an exciting form of one-to-one marketing, in which the meaning is whatever the customer wants.

The importance of color to food marketers and consumers is well established. Stouffer's entrees come in red boxes. Kraft comes in blue. Dark green vegetables are healthy. Green and orange packages both signal decaffeinated. Green cigarettes say menthol, green mouthwash says mint, and green bottles now say ketchup, as well as lime. Gold says Godiva and silver says Coors and Lever 2000. Bright yellow says Cheerios, and orangy yellow says Arm & Hammer. Fresh meat sells best when it's blooming dark red and doesn't sell when it's frozen gray. A book about packaging that I edited some years ago includes a chapter by a former Campbell Soup executive titled: "Why all packages should be red and white."

The bottom color line of all this is that food marketers should urge their creative people to think about ways color can please your customers and win new attention for your brands and stores.