Barringtonia
07-01-2008, 07:00
So says Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, an ad agency owned by WPP Group. In marketing circles as well as the broader consumer consciousness, the environment was certainly one of the defining issues of 2007. Now, she said, "some eco-fatigue has set in".
"The idea of green has been so overused and misused that it has ceased to mean anything"
So, in 2008, marketers increasingly will link environmental messages with the colour blue rather than green. This is more than just superficial rebranding she insisted. The issues associated with what Mack called "environmentalism 2.0" - climate change and access to clean water - are more clearly signaled by blue, the colour of the sky and water, than by green, which many people negatively associate with "tree huggers and sandals"; she said.
Now, before you get all "marketing is the devil's work", which it might be, it does affect us and for this I use a Hollywood film!
Miranda Priestly: This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.
So, why are your impressionable minds affected by this sort of thing, what kind of sell-outs are you to be buying a different washing powder because it has blue packaging rather than green?
Why?
"The idea of green has been so overused and misused that it has ceased to mean anything"
So, in 2008, marketers increasingly will link environmental messages with the colour blue rather than green. This is more than just superficial rebranding she insisted. The issues associated with what Mack called "environmentalism 2.0" - climate change and access to clean water - are more clearly signaled by blue, the colour of the sky and water, than by green, which many people negatively associate with "tree huggers and sandals"; she said.
Now, before you get all "marketing is the devil's work", which it might be, it does affect us and for this I use a Hollywood film!
Miranda Priestly: This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.
So, why are your impressionable minds affected by this sort of thing, what kind of sell-outs are you to be buying a different washing powder because it has blue packaging rather than green?
Why?