Colour is often talked about as a powerful brand asset. It can distinguish your brand from others in the market or indeed separate different products within your brand range.

Changing your primary brand colour, even for limited special seasonal packaging, can backfire as Coca Cola have learned in the USA.

The launch of special seasonal designs for the cola giant is nothing new, but this year was the first time Coca Cola deviated from ‘red’ to launch a polar design on a white can.

The snow white design was part of a World Wildlife Fund partnership and the Arctic Home Campaign to highlight the global warming threat to bears’ Arctic habitat.

Click here to view the embedded video.

However, the ‘white’ caused confusion and a string of complaints on social networks in the USA. Many criticised the company for messing with ‘their’ brand and some believed that the changes even impacted the actual product.

In particular, the white was seen as too similar to ‘silver’, the colour associated with Diet Coke, the low calorie sibling that has very distinct product attributes and audience.

The Wall Street Journal reports that customers responded with hundred of tweets that accused Coke of ‘trickery,’ and labelled the white cans as ‘blasphemy’.

Scott Williamson, a spokesman for Coca Cola told the Wall Street Journal, “The white can resonated with us because it was bold, attention-grabbing and reinforced the campaign theme. Coke’s marketing executives wanted a ‘disruptive’ campaign to get consumers’ attention, he says.”

The extent to which colour is ingrained on the minds of your audience, not just for brand recognition but also aligned to product attributes should not be underestimated.

Coke is red and even for a good cause; it appears that some consumers’ feel that is something you shouldn’t mess with.

This illustrates the extent that consternation occurs and probably always has done when you alter a critical brand asset. Only now, social media gives us a window into the world of our customers and we can very quickly get a sense of their anxiety.

They certainly created some disruption, but the lesson for Coke, like any brand considering packaging changes, is to ensure that a short term campaign doesn’t cause lasting damage to the brand.

It is important not to deviate too much from the core brand assets and in doing so, cause confusion or alienate your core audience. You need to think carefully before you change any of the visual cues as this could significantly impact the meaning of the brand communication and its relationship with its audience.

To counter some of the public debate Coke was forced to issue a ‘fact sheet’ about the white coke cans and how to distinguish Coke from Diet Coke. Issuing fact sheets was the start of the end for the white cans. The admission from Coke that the colour switch was causing too much confusion and potentially damaging the brand, soon followed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Initially planned to run through until February, the white cans are now to become extinct much earlier. The polar bear design has now been updated with the traditional coke red colour and will gradually replace all the white cans in stores across the USA.

Interestingly, most tweets since the announcement have been about quite negative about Coke retreating from the white can. In particular, there still seems to be some confusion that the whole campaign has now been dropped (which it hasn’t).

The WWF bear cans are not being used here in Australia as Coke continues with their ‘share a coke with your buddy’ summer promotion.

Michael Hughes
Director of Brand Strategy

We often find ourselves reminding clients that there’s much more to the craft of brand identity design than might meet the eye. Four years at University learning the basics, followed by years of experience designing hundreds of brand identities and pieces of brand communication for businesses across all markets provide the basis for what might seem like creative fancy, but is actually highly tuned application of visual coded communication. Not convinced? Ask these Russian police whether their uniform design should have involved a brand design professional.

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
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Designer of Brand Meaning and Fan of the Pink Police

Today it’s more critical than ever for businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors and make memorable connections with their audience by creating unique, recognisable brands.

Colour in Brand Design
Every touch point of a brand plays a vital role in brand recall, but the brand mark is the heart and soul of a brand’s image. Whilst it’s the interplay between colour, typeface, and symbol that creates a brand mark, colour is registered by the brain before either images or typography. A University of Loyola, Maryland study recently found the correct use of colour could increase brand recognition by up to 80%.

Standing out from the crowd
As awareness of branding grows and more businesses invest in their brand’s identity, colour is becoming more important for companies looking to differentiate themselves visually. Consider the success of Heinz Green ketchup. In the first seven months following its introduction more than 10 million bottles were sold. The result was the highest sales increase in the brand’s history, all because of a simple color change. Apple introduced colourful iMacs into a marketplace where colour had not been seen before. The Apple brand was the first to say, “It doesn’t have to be beige”. The iMacs reinvigorated a brand that had suffered $1.8 billion of losses in two years.

A World of Colour
Colour also provides communication cues for brand attributes such as traditional or cutting edge, calm or excited, as well as cultural cues, cues about environmental credibility, cues about political affiliations and a plethora of other meanings. In the world of brand design, choice and use of colour provides the potential for a wealth of carefully crafted and powerfully communicated messages about your brand.

Recognisable Brands Test
Most of the most recognisable brands in the world rely on colour as a key factor in their instant recognition. Below are snapshots of twenty of the world’s most recognisable brand marks cropped to show a clear representation of their brand colours, but only a fraction of their logotype of symbol. Test yourself to see how many of the brands you can identify with colour being the primary visual driver.

The answers
01. Heineken
02. adidas
03. Toyota
04. British Airways
05. BP
06. Google
07. BMW
08. Vodafone
09. Ford
10. McDonald’s
11. Coca Cola
12. Olympic Games
13. Microsoft
14. IBM
15. Nike
16. Pepsi
17. GE
18. Qantas
19. Nokia
20. Virgin

So how’d you go?
18 or more correct: You’re brand obsessed (you’d fit in well around here)
15-17 correct: You’re pretty brand aware (and probably addicted to TV)
10-14 correct: Observation skills are not your strength – likely to leave home wearing different coloured socks
9 or less correct: You’re suffering brand avoidance – might be worth getting checked-out for colour blindness

If you’d like to talk to some people who spend way too much of their life eating, sleeping, thinking about the role of colour in developing a highly recognisable and unforgettable brand identity give us a call.

Cassandra Gill, Design Director.