Selling Colour

I never knew that when market a product was so much involved until now! The use of colours really help identify who the product is aimed at. For example the Cadbury product 'Spots Vs Stripes', people tend to associate chocolate and the colour purple to Cadbury's Dairy Milk. This is what they have done with 'Spots Vs Stripes'. They have kept the purple background but added some white to show how it is different but people still know it is a Dairy Milk bar. 

Their main competitors attempted to use different shades of the colour purple for example Nestle Yorkie Raisin & Biscuit used the colour burgundy but have not had as much success than the original Dairy Milk bar. In 2008 Cadbury Trebor Bassett redesigned the Dairy Milk range yet keeping each product unique whilst still making the packaging uniform. This helped increase sales of their products and helped the products that didn't sell as much as before, for example Cadbury's Turkish. (Mintel, Chocolate confectionery UK, 2010).

Many different colours show different things for example the colour green on a pack of Walkers salt and vinegar crisps is well known yet the colour on packet rarely has anything to do with the flavor of the product. This shows that the marketers are using colour to aim their product at certain age groups. This plays a big part in the market place as boys aged between 5-8 tend to think girls have 'koodies' and that everything pink is associated with girls therefore they may not want to eat prawn cocktail crisps.

The same rule applies in the fresh fruit and vegetable market, if the produce is off colour people will not buy that one and look for an alternative. If all the produce is like this the company will either have to reduce it at a loss or they will have to take it off sale and make an even bigger loss. 


To finish off this edition of Global Waffle many companies stick to their known colours but often try and edit their colour schemes to see if it makes any difference to sales. If not they can quickly withdraw the product from the market and re distribute the original product.


(http://academic.mintel.com , accessed Wednesday 20th October 2010)