Saturday 18 August 2012

I like olive green

This piece from the Guardian speculates that plain packaging will backfire. Quite simply, some people like drab colours:

Source
The olive industry in Australia wasn't happy with the characterisation of olive green as drab.

The problem is that tobacco control does not understand the allure of tobacco. It also tries to objectify what is really subjective, and trying to persuade us that everyone has the same taste in colour is absurd as trying to persuade us that everyone perceives tobacco as having the same risks, or that everyone has the same attitude to risk.

The Guardian puts it like this:
But you know that's going to backfire, right? In an age where companies use social media to make "friends" with everyone under the sun and consumer loyalty can no longer be bought through traditional top-down, shouty shouty means, de-branding is branding. This is an age where the 90s culture-jamming strategies of Adbusters and No Logo, originally designed to subvert the power of mainstream advertising, have now been gracelessly co-opted and absorbed by … mainstream advertising. Olive green packaging? It's minimal, man. Puss-filled cancer eyeballs? Terror is so in right now.
The fact that people are not supposed to like drab olive green will be exploited to the full by marketing and advertising 'creatives'. They won't be able to resist it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello, Belinda --

My parents (formative adolescence and adulthood from the late 1930s to the first half of the 1950s) always referred to the color olive as 'olive drab'.

The more things change ... ;)

Keep up the great work!

Churchmouse

farmland investments said...

Oh frick, one of my favorite light sweaters Fall sweaters is "drab" olive green. Does mean I'll look like an unfashionable fool this fall?:)

Pat Nurse MA said...

You forgot to mention that smell is also subjective. It isn't against the law yet to actually like the fresh aromatic smell of tobacco burning but the antis have made it a "fact" that "everyone" hates the smell of tobacco - not true.

As for olive green - it's a colour I like too. I really don't like bright colours and gold and silver look so tacky.