Metropolis Feature: The Color Guard

From plants and corporate headquarters in industrial zones all over America, members of this nonprofit association have gathered to figure out what colors you will be buying in 2000.

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Marketers from every sector of manufacturing are trying to figure out your taste in hues--or, even better, to dictate it.

by Ellen Barry

Eliot Burrows didn't come to Montreal to shove iridescents down your throat. There was a period early in the history of the Color Marketing Group when delegates like Burrows lived and died for a color--when they showed up at forecasting sessions and made a passionate case for tangerine, say, or flesh--but that approach has been replaced by a glacial observation of public taste. Wait long enough and sooner or later, the idea goes, whatever color you're fond of will cycle into popularity.

For almost 20 years, Burrows' colleagues at the Engelhard Pigment and Additives Group have been bringing large rolls of iridescent plastic film to a jury of their peers at the Color Marketing Group, and for as many years the peers turned up their noses.

"They would say, 'Oh, that looks garish.' They didn't link it with class or value," says Sunny Maffeo, Engelhard's director of creative marketing, surrounded by glimmering samples. Burrows, an ebullient sales manager in a purple beret, agrees: "Tackiness," he says. "It looked tacky."

This year, suddenly, it doesn't look tacky anymore. Whether it's the economy, or the millennium, or sheer boredom with the mattes of the past, color-changing iridescents and metallics have broken free of the preteen lip gloss niche and begun to appear in luxury footwear--to say nothing of office furniture and automotive, where the color parable of the moment is the back-order on silver Volkswagen Beetles. The company had been counting on blue and red, but when it came down to writing the check, everyone wanted yellow or silver. All day, when the 614 delegates divided up into subcommittees and wrestled their way toward color consensus, the biggest story--almost as big as last year's blue story--was a technology-driven luster.

After all that time spent lugging around film, the iridescent people have the feeling that their ship has come in.

"I think we're going from 'It Takes a Village' to 'Hey, Vegas isn't bad to visit once in a while,'" says Burrows. "The timing is perfect, just perfect."

On the sixth floor of the Montreal Sheraton, in a ballroom full of delegates from industries as far-flung as wallpaper and athletic shoes, color news is being made. From plants and corporate headquarters in industrial zones all over America, members of this nonprofit association (motto: "Color Sells--and the 'Right' Colors Sell Better!") have gathered to figure out what colors you will be buying in 2000: the color of kitchen appliances and carpets, of Kleenex and the boxes that hold Kleenex. Their ruling will appear in two months' time as a series of four color-sample cards, which are closely guarded by members and sold to nonmembers for $7,000. Two to three years hence, the colors on those palettes will show up on products, which will then be sold to regular people, who are occasionally referred to as "color consumers."

With their pleated khakis and pin-on name tags, the assembled members of the Color Marketing Group look pretty much like any other conventioneers. They're not fashion people, or even fashionable people. But listening in on their dialogue opens up an amazing secret world, because of course they're right: Somehow--through collective subconscious or effective marketing or both--society comes to agreement on what looks good. If aesthetic clout is measured on the level of everyday experience, then these may be some of America's most important arbiters of taste.

Burrows sees this role as something slightly beyond the human. "If there was not a Color Marketing Group, [trends in color] would be so much more confusing," he says. "I think this organization brings form and substance to chaos."

Where does taste come from? Schoolchildren are encouraged early on to think of a favorite color as a marker of individual identity, but Harvard Medical School neuroscientist and vision expert Margaret Livingstone, when asked whether the phenomenon of color preference has a basis in biology, responds with one word: No.

True, there are certain hardwired responses to color. Humans and rhesus monkeys seem to share a basic order of color preference running down the list from blue to red to green to purple to yellow to orange, with the notable exception of blue foodstuffs, which both humans and animals tend to avoid.

But in our consumer society, taste--even the taste we consider most essential to our personality--doesn't hold up very long against social pressure. Certainly that's the conclusion that Pat Verlodt, former president of the CMG, has come to. "I don't think in general the customer is aware of it," Verlodt says. She also says, "There are a lot of people out there who will change on a dime."

That's good news for marketers, who count on the idea that people not only long for a radical departure from the ordinary, but crave the same radical departure at the same time. Remember 1997, when the first man in your office took the cheeky fashion risk of a French blue shirt? Remember a few months later, when every man in the office took that same cheeky fashion risk? The lesson seems clear: Up against the suggestion that your favorite color is outmoded, your favorite color is history.

Color doesn't age well in our society--not in automotive, not in interiors, and certainly not in apparel. Consider mauve, that bedspread-and-wallpaper stalwart of the late-Eighties hospitality industry; mauve died three years ago, and was not mourned. Jewel tones, those inescapable "quality" Klaxons of the early Nineties? Stiff and cold since 1995. And in women's fashion, whose influence trickles down to all the other sectors, a color that one year seems bold and absolutely modern can, a few years later, give off a strong whiff of desperation. The truly honest admit that.

"I do like blue, but when red hit I was right there," recalls Margaret Walch, who is director of the Color Association, America's second-biggest forecasting group, after the CMG. By 1990, though, the world was over red. "I had a red Liz Claiborne dress, and I remember wearing it and my daughter said, 'Where are you going, to get a bank loan?' I said, 'It's a Liz Claiborne!' She said, 'I don't know what it is.'"

This fickleness shows up even in product categories that might seem immune to fashion. The classic case study is the avocado refrigerator. From the enlightened perspective of the 1990s, the 1960s craze for avocado and harvest-gold appliances takes on the quality of mass hysteria. Why avocado? Avocado's not pretty. Still, the tremendous pistons of industry pumped out a long line of avocado plastics, avocado dryers, and avocado stoves, until a significant proportion of America's private spaces were avocado-colored. Industrial color consultants still talk about the "avocado syndrome" in tones of mild distaste, as if it were a germ.

"You can talk to anybody about avocado, and they just look at you like, 'Don't bring that up again.' We call it 'the A word,'" says Verlodt. "It's difficult to flush out a trend that big. It died in five or six years as far as new products go, but as far as houses go, it's probably in its thirtieth year. I know people who still have that color in their home, and they've learned to live with it, which is good, because it's cycling back. But it'll come back under another name. They can never call it 'avocado.' It's 'sage.' The name just terrifies people."

Over the last several decades, color has increasingly become a primary factor in consumer choices, and therefore big business. Which is why these people are here in Montreal. At events like this, they plan ahead to ensure that you see your new favorite color, and that you can accessorize your new favorite color with new favorite complementary colors. They network between manufacturing sectors until so many of the cues are coming in from so many directions that suddenly it hits you like a message from your soul: blue.

The major debates at CMG workshops may revolve around matters like "icy pink," but the proceedings are nonetheless dead serious. For instance: Reporters covering the meeting, often dispatched by industry publications such as Tissue News, are required to sign a statement that they will not remove yarn samples or audiotapes that might reveal the developing palette to nonmembers. And the forecast workshop meetings can be grave affairs, as roomfuls of experts stare intently at tiny swatches of color pinned to squares of posterboard, comparing trends in their own industries and waiting to come to agreement on which shade is about to make it big.

Americans have always been in the vanguard of institutionalized color marketing, but in the beginning, it was only because they were afraid of being cut off from Europe. In 1915, when World War I threatened to prevent the import of dyed goods from Paris, the presidents of major American textile firms met for the first time to coordinate and standardize the colors they produced: Never again, they decided, would America risk a fashion embargo. Small panels of Color Association experts still convene every year to issue its forecast cards.

The Color Association is a different crowd from the CMG, as Margaret Walch is quick to point out. Walch believes that artistic choices are better left in the hands of a few experts than in a convention center full of people from all sectors of industry. Color, for her, is not a democratic decision.

"I think what they do is less aesthetic," says Walch. "It's all about the gain. Whereas for us, the winning aesthetic forecast is more aspirational. We are positively elitist. They are the opposite of that. They were basically founded on the idea of marketing with color."

Precisely. The CMG's history begins in the late 1950s, when members of a group of paint and dye manufacturers called the Inter-Society Color Council got together and conceived the idea that "if it doesn't sell, it's a bad color." When the CMG was officially formed, in 1962, it attracted representatives from a vast array of industries. By the 1980s, the group had overshot the Color Association to become the country's largest forecasting organization, with a membership that last year exceeded 1,500.

From the beginning, the CMG offered a novel cross-pollination between manufacturing sectors; a typical meeting now brings in delegates from the automotive, retail, hospitality, and health-care industries, making it "the broadest cross section of manufacturing in the United States," according to Harold Linton, a design professor at Bradley University in Illinois whose books include Color Forecasting: A Survey of International Color Marketing (1994) and Color in Architecture, due out this spring. It was a timely idea. During the first decade of the CMG's existence, color watchers were just beginning to believe a theory now accepted as fact--that color trends trickle down from couture, to ready-to-wear, to automotive, to interiors, to appliances, until they finally come to rest in utilitarian household goods such as watering cans.

There have been a limited number of measurable forecasting coups in the last decade or so, but they bathed the field in glory when they came. Bring up teal--star of a late-Eighties CMG palette--and many in this crowd will respond with a sweet, reminiscent smile. Larry Wegner, for example, talks about teal the way old high school football heroes talk about that one perfect homecoming.

"I remember I was in the office products industry in the Eighties," says Wegner, a color consultant who is now with the Houston-based firm Cooper Lighting. He is a snappy dresser, and touches your arm when he's making a point. "We were doing a package deal for a company and I did a teal. So I sat with all the vice presidents and presidents in this room, and they were all [skeptical], and I stood up there and I said, 'Look, I will stake my reputation that this package will sell.' My boss was the VP of marketing and he said 'OK, let's go with it.'"

He pauses for dramatic effect.

"It was the biggest seller of the year," he says. "It won awards from Home Depot. And today, if I go in with polka-dotted and striped packaging with naked cherubs on it, the president will say, 'If that's what Larry wants.'"

Bob Daily, color marketing manager for DuPont, has a similar teal story. His teal was called Cayman, and he developed it for Ford. Fifteen years ago, anyone sitting in a boardroom pushing the idea of a teal car would have been laughed out of Detroit, but in 1989, Daily came back from a CMG meeting where he had gotten an earful about teal wallpaper and teal gift wrap.

Two years later, 51 percent of Ford GT Limited Editions were selling in Cayman; although customers had 10 colors to choose from, more than half were choosing teal. At some point, Ford's project manager for the Escort told Daily that his color had boosted that car's market share by 2 percent. Suddenly, the color consultant actually had clout, and could be dispatched to Seventh Avenue fashion shows, as Daily sometimes has been.

When the profit that results from a new shade is measurable, color becomes no more or less than a commodity, and marketers regard it with the coolness of the habitual assessor. Burrows, for instance, appears to identify closely with iridescents, but makes a point of declining to reveal his favorite color. "It's fine to ask a non-CMG person that," he says. "But you ask a CMGer and yeah, whatever hot product they have that's selling, that's their favorite color, because that's what sells."

Color forecasting depends, for its existence, on the idea that public taste can be anticipated, either as a reaction to current events or as some kind of natural oscillation. To the outside observer, forecasters' explanations for changes in taste can come across as less than scientific. Here, for instance, is an oracular passage from a recent issue of View on Color, a Dutch magazine that covers the color forecasting world:

This winter may be full of trepidation and excitement, but in order to not lose ourselves in the millennium changeover, we will throw out a lifeline. Trying to find our way in the sociological, economic and political developments that will mark this era, we will tie a metaphorical piece of string to something we can trust, and forge ahead in the labyrinth of change finding paths to the future without losing our ties to the past. This conceptual string that guides us will also bring a strong desire for knits.

There are times at the CMG convention when this kind of talk flows like a mighty river. WASTE IS THE NEW NATURAL RESOURCE, someone has posted in one conference room; brainstorming sessions yield such mystifying catchwords as "DOWN"LOAD, DIFFERENT TOGETHER and TECH-TONIC. At various moments during the conference, one color expert attributes the recent lightening and brightening of colors to economic boom (because people are upbeat) and another points to economic downturn (because people need cheering up).

Still, certain major color phenomena do make sense in historical context. There's nothing new about these theories; in 1851, when the designer Owen Jones was defending his use of bright colors inside Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, he invoked the Greeks' use of primary colors and argued that rich, saturated hues signify the high-water mark of a civilization, according to Linton's Color Forecasting. In recent American history, mass-produced colors still serve as acute barometers of mood. The bright pastels of the 1950s--think of chartreuse Fiestaware and two-tone lilac roadsters--could only be postwar, just as the dark grays and somber reds of the Forties belonged to wartime. The Eighties flooded colors with a grayish tone (hence mauve) that seemed to communicate class.

There are also convincing explanations of color taste based on more practical matters of consumer behavior. Color marketers tend to agree that the fashion palette changes at least every two years, whereas the interior design palette lags behind, with a complete change every three to five years, based on the frequency with which people replace their goods. Other analysts have theorized that overexposure to one color makes people long for its chromatic opposite, and that our collective taste is caught in a perpetual shuttle from one extreme to another. In Color Forecasting, a psychologist from the University of Salzburg lays out a periodic cycle of collective color preference that veers toward strong, vibrant colors and back again like a metronome:

• Highly chromatic colors, with intense contrasts of hue (e.g., 1972--74)
• Darker colors; contrasting hues become darker, less intense (e.g., 1974-- 76)
• Earth colors, marked by a similarity in hue (e.g., 1976--79)
• Lighter colors, veering off toward beiges and pastels (e.g., 1979--81)
• Trend toward pure white, contrasts in whiteness (e.g., 1981--84)
• Achromatic colors, including a variety of subtle contrasts (e.g., 1984--88)
• Chromatic colors (e.g., 1988--91)
• Highly chromatic colors (e.g., 1991 on)
• Purple (1992) indicates the beginning of a new color cycle

What can't be calculated--the thing that makes color forecasting more than a science--is an element of human mystery, CMG members say. Verlodt refers to this as the forecaster's "sixth sense." Some organizations highlight this mystical quality more than others, presenting the group's choices as if they were magical intuitions rather than educated guesses agreed upon in boardrooms. Premiere Vision, a color forecasting body that formed in France in the 1970s, ceremoniously opens up its Hall of Predictions on the last day of its annual meeting, presenting tremendous chips of color, disembodied and suspended from the ceiling, as though they had dropped from on high.

Other schools of thought discount the "sixth sense" in favor of pure data. Jim King, who works in automotive finishes at DuPont, tells a story about a group of Japanese colleagues who came up with a long-range scientific analysis based on past color preferences. It was fine research, fastidiously executed, King says, but it fell wide of the mark.

"I think that's because life is chaotic," King says. "Chaotic events happen. World War I happened. When something like that occurs, the psyche changes, and when the psyche changes, color choice changes."

King's tone of deep human wisdom seems to gloss over a parallel truth about taste in color: People tend to like what they see, and the CMG has a large measure of power over what they see. As early as the 1970s, Linton says, the CMG was big enough to affect what colors were available on the consumer market simply by having a meeting like this one, after which delegates return to their companies with serene confidence that their suggestions will be "right." In this sense, the CMG serves as a sort of "accrediting agency," as Linton puts it, and chairholders add its initials after their names as if they signified an advanced degree. Even people steeped in the culture of color marketing admit that the CMG's predictions are, to some degree, self-fulfilling prophecies.

Because while there is biological evidence that humans respond strongly to color, it isn't at all clear that humans (or rhesus monkeys, for that matter) have some kind of primal drive for a new palette every year. There are plenty of cultures that have remained faithful to certain colors for centuries--the Greek islands, with their blue-and-white houses, for example. Even Walch, of the Color Association, admits that although the demand for constant novelty is partly a hardwired need, it is also partly "an inbred quality in consumer society."

Color forecasters, needless to say, do all they can to nurture and respond to that demand. They are fastidious about the issue of timing; the colors for 2002, decided at the meeting along with those of 2000, are now in the hands of CMG members, but will be carefully held back until the populace is "ready." It's a kind of social contract. The color won't come in until all the cues are in place: trends are much more effective if everyone cooperates. "We help it happen," says DuPont's Jim King. "We don't make it happen, but we help it happen."

Verlodt's recommendation of tur-quoise and raspberry boosted Igloo's cooler sales by 15 percent in 1991, and she has seen how the field can actually alter taste on an individual level. It's not so much that color marketers can make you start loving a color. They can certainly make you stop hating it, though.

"It probably takes a year or two," she says. "You have to be surrounded by it. When everybody else has jumped on the bandwagon, and you just can't get away from it, unless you're really adamant on a color, you'll give up."

The color marketers' ambitions don't stop there, either. Everyone at the CMG agrees that tastes are cycling faster these days, and that consumers are growing increasingly demanding, according to the CMG's current president, Melanie Wood. It's a trend her group is trying to encourage, she says.

"That's what we want to do as color marketers. We want color to be so exciting that you would have an appliance on your countertop and you would throw it out because it's boring white and they've suddenly come out in lilac," says Wood, who is vice president for style, merchandising, and presentation at Mannington Mills, a textile manufacturer in Salem, New Jersey. "What happens is they're saying, 'How can we increase our market share? Our irons aren't wearing out. Our mixers and our blenders aren't wearing out. What can we do to make people want to buy a new one?'"

It's not a trick question. The answer is color.

Most of the delegates to the CMG would consider themselves to be artistically inclined--in order to be admitted to the association, candidates must have either a degree in "design- or color-related" fields or eight years of "color- or design-related experience." But other types of artistic people take the view that the business of color forecasting is soulless aesthetics-by-committee. Anais Missakian, acting head of the Rhode Island School of Design's textiles department, says she sometimes gets flack from designers when she tells them she brings her students on field trips to the Color Association's headquarters. Creative people, she says, "want to believe that they are at the root of the creative process. They don't want anyone dictating to them what the latest color is."

That's not an uncommon reaction, says Linton, who logged a lot of time with the CMG while putting together Color Forecasting. He felt that way a little himself in the beginning. But he also urges skeptics to take another look, arguing that design marketers are forever poised between their roles as visionaries and salesmen, and that there's a certain delicacy to their position. They want to give people something fresh to look at without actually foisting it on them. They want to be bold and, simultaneously, profitable. They want to be in the vanguard, but they want lots and lots of company.

"People sometimes think, Stepford Wives," Linton says. "People see it from a distance as everyone being like everyone else. [Critics of the process] may be individualistic artists and poets and spirits and feed-the-soul-first-and-think-about-other-things-later. But if you're involved in architecture or automotive, you have a sense of reality that's fairly complicated.

"It's just a big chunk of material you're responsible for, and you're still a creative, driven artist," he says. "It's just a different world. It's not the artist in the garret at all. It's the artist in the throes of industrial society."

Even so, there are cases in which professional color marketers have failed utterly to move the masses, and are left gazing at their paint chips, wondering why. Witness the story of orange: Over the years, despite considerable rehabilitative efforts by the color people, the public has mulishly dug in its heels against the prompt of orange, says Walch.

"The limit is, if people don't want it, they don't want it," says Walch. "I would say orange is a good example of that. It's the darling of the high-fashion world, but it suffers from its abrasive roadside image, its fast food image. We try to point out that melon is as orange as hunter orange, which is what we're talking about, and that it is a terrific shade. But people don't like it."

How to account for this failure of the process? Does the consumer look sallow in orange? Maybe deep inside the consumer is a tiny core of individual taste that can't be manipulated. Or--possibly--it's just because even color marketers are sometimes moved by artistic impulses that aren't backed up by the demographics.
At the CMG gala, most delegates toe the line that the people's will does, and should, dictate the direction of our collective aesthetic, and that, as per the CMG's motto, the color that "Sells Better" is always the "Right Color." But near the end of the evening, after several glasses of wine, one conventioneer suggests that the customer may occasionally turn out to have bad taste.

"Personally, we disagree with the public all the time," he begins, "but professionally..." He shrugs, looking out over a table littered with shrimp tails and crumpled napkins. He doesn't finish his sentence.

Keywords:
color, color forecasting, Color Marketing Group, Color Association, avocado, teal