Are we entering an era of boring colours but exciting brand marques?

There was a time, 20 years ago, when you had a tough time getting a white or cream coloured refrigerator. The growing middle class wanted to display their refrigerator, mostly 165-litre capacity, in their living room. The more conspicuous the colour, the better.

 

That thirst seems to have been quenched and we don’t see the preponderance of red and blue refrigerators anymore. The variety of refrigerators on display has dramatically increased, to compensate for the loss of colour.

 

Are cars different?

 

The article, ‘Black, blue shine bright for car owners’ in this newspaper on December 31 got me thinking about car colours all over again. It also reminded me of Ratan Tata’s obsession with the right colour car for the car launches. I got a taste of this when we were launching the Indigo Marina station wagon in 2004. I was requested to rush to the NCPA to be on call since Mr Tata wanted to check the car to be used for the launch event.

 

Two engineers had landed up with the car at the NCPA and the marketing team was busy with other arrangements for the launch. Mr Tata decided to drop all that he was doing to check the colour of the car. But why?

 

As it transpired, it was Mr Tata who had suggested to the product team that they should try out a silver coloured car for the launch. The technique of making it was a little complex. Several attempts had failed and Mr Tata was not sure if the team would get it right. But they had, and they wanted to use it for the launch.

 

Mr Tata, the man who was known for his attention to detail, would not want to miss the opportunity to check out the car once again. I was there to see the interaction between the engineers and Mr Tata. The car did pass the Tata Test and we used it for the launch.

 

The car was never sold in that colour, but I remember the incident and have talked about it as an example of how the leader of an organisation can inspire his team to think out of the box (Sponge – Leadership Lessons I Learnt From My Clients).

 

Though silver or bright silver was never the colour to be mass manufactured, I do know that silver gray is possibly the most popular car colour around the world. At least it was till the 2010s.

 

The report in Business Standard says that white is the most popular colour in India now, though its popularity is dropping (43.9 per cent in 2021 to 39.3 per cent in 2024). We are not sure how much of this is contributed by the taxi segment.

 

Black seems to have grown rapidly, from 14.8 per cent to 20.2 per cent, possibly due to growth of SUVs. At one time, black Scorpios used to be the favorite of political leaders of all hues.

 

Silver, or I suppose silver gray, has dropped from 9.9 per cent to 6.7 per cent, and this was a surprise. Blue seems to be moving up from 8.8 per cent to 10.9 per cent. The top four colours used to account for 90.2 per cent and this number has moved to 91.2 per cent – a small but significant increase.

 

All these four colours are common, but in order to stand out brands tend to use one particular colour in their advertising and it is rarely white or silver. At one time, we used to photograph the cars in various colours to study how they reproduced; green and blue were a problem. Silver gray was difficult to shoot.

 

All that is now history, since most car pictures you see in print ads, on websites and in brochures are not photographs at all. They are all computer generated images. So you can get any colour you want without worrying about reproduction.

 

That said, there is a lot of fun that can be had with colours. When all personal computers were sold in boring gray and off-white colours, it was Apple that launched the iMac in brilliant fruity colours in 1999. Though Henry Ford had observed about Model T that he would provide the car in any colour the customer wanted so long as it was black, brands like Volkswagen Beetle and BMW Mini have used colours to dial up their fun quotient in the global market. In the Indian two-wheeler market, it was Piaggio’s Vespa that used the power of interesting colours to stand apart.

 

We saw refrigerators move from boring white to brilliant blues and reds to dial back to white and gray as the products dropped down the display or brag value scale. I wonder if this is also happening with cars. You are not that worried about the colour of the car as long as the marque is well known.

 

Just as the days when you bought a Maruti 800, painted it in jazzy colours, and loaded it with all kinds of gizmos like special headlights and mag-alloy wheels are gone, are we getting into an era of boring colours but exciting brand marques?

 

  Ambi Parameswaran is an independent brand coach and founder brand-building.com; he can be reached at ambimgp@brand-building.com