What’s the value of a colour? In the world of branding, colour can mean a lot, so much so that companies are able to use it to deceive us. While researching an encyclopedia entry on Deception in Advertising (which I am co-writing with my partner Chris Falzon for the Sage Encyclopedia of Advertising and Society), we found many of examples of unethical advertising, which led me to question the use of colour in branding, packaging and logos. I found that the simple use of a colour was enough to convey a message, and that this message can be used to deceive us.
The two main examples of this are: greenwash and gendered advertising. BP is famous for its greenwashing, so much so that it was awarded Greenpeace’s Emerald Paintbrush award for greenwashing in 2008. In 2000, BP changed its name from British Petroleum to beyond petroleum, using the colour green in combination with a flower-shaped logo to create the impression it is environmentally aware, despite its terrible track record in environmental management (including oil spills, toxic waste and more, details here). As much as the name change, the flower and other aspects of the rebranding were important, the simple use of the colour green says so much about this brand. It’s not the only brand to use green in this way. For graphic designers who want to be ethical, check out Green Graphic Design by Brian Dougherty.
Colour can also be used in branding and marketing products to symbolise meaning – such as children’s toys and clothes, where pink means girl and blue means boy. While, if pushed, I can somehow see a social convention that allows people to tell whether your baby is a boy or a girl via colour could be seen as convenient shorthand, the advertisers have taken this simple division beyond all logical extremes, effectively prescribing children toys based on gender alone. While there has been some criticism of #nogenderdecember which sought to dispel gender stereotypes during the Christmas season, with cries of “if my daughter wants a Barbie I’ll buy her one”, those people miss the point.
Children should be given a range of toys to play with – that way girls can pick up a ball, or a doll or a car or all of the above – as can boys. And the real problem behind gendered marketing is that, unfortunately for society, companies have discovered that they can make a lot more money this way because by dividing their market using colour, they imply that a product is made just for you.
And it’s not just kids falling for it. Adults also fall for pink and rounded shapes for women and black/grey and sharper edges for men. This allows companies to charge much more for women’s products than for men (it’s only occasionally the other way around). See this great clip from ABC’s The Checkout for some great examples.
So what does this tell us? That consumers are stupid? Perhaps, but it also shows the way that signs and colours are having an influence on us whether we acknowledge it or not. In the 1950s French theorist Roland Barthes used the study of signs – semiology – to examine modern myths, such as the status of wine in France, wrestling, advertisements for detergents and margarine and toys.
On the subject of toys, Barthes claims that, apart from building blocks which allow you to make your own stories, toys always mean something – and that something is always socialized, “constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life” (Mythologies, Barthes, 1957). For example, by encouraging girls to play with dolls, we are actually socializing them for motherhood. I would argue that this is fine as long as boys are also able and encouraged to play with them, socialising them in turn for fatherhood. Unfortunately, colours are used to code these toys for girls only.
As well as #nogenderdecember, there has been some backlash, such as this charming story about a girl who writes a fantastic letter to a publisher complaining that she likes bugs just as much as boys, so the Biggest Baddest Book of Bugs for Boys is a bad name. The publisher subsequently dropped “for Boys” on all of their books in the series.
And then there’s this kid who gets it. Maybe we are not so stupid after all.
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