“Don’t get me wrong Mom, you know blue is one of my favorite
colors. But there is so much more than teal, baby blue, royal and
navy...”
I smiled to myself and thought how many times I’d been shopping only to
find blue my only choice. And blue is not one of my favorites.
Two days later I was in a meeting with a prospective client.
One of the senior marketers in the room asked a very thoughtful question.
“If
those of us making the decisions here are a bunch of people in management and
not necessarily reflective of the people making purchases, should we ask those
shoppers to do the design for us?”
The answer was, “No.”
Sure, those shoppers know what they like. But so much of that is
influenced by what they’ve seen. Importantly they cannot anticipate or
appreciate a company’s vision for the future, for innovation or for newness.
Couple that with the fact that in general people are creatures of habit. This
means that we will typically gravitate to the known, the comfortable. This
isn’t necessarily bad. However, it doesn’t provide the opportunity to stretch
and find new expression.
And so the cycle perpetuates. We like blue. It’s
comfortable. And thus our
choices remain blue. Unfortunately this is the danger of having all of us be
the designer. In the end, it doesn’t allow much opportunity to express a unique
point of view in the final execution.
Perhaps that’s why we see so much blue out there.