Colour Trend Expert Explores Brands Copyrighting Colour
Brands should own colours but a trademark isn't what they need...
Alison Rodwell, colour trend expert at James Cropper, asks if colour can be owned?
The dispute between a well known telecoms company and a small insurance business continues hot debate over the trademarking of colour. In this case a trademarked colour ‘Pantone Rhodamine Red U’, often known as simply magenta, was in question and poses the question whether colour can really be ‘owned’?
Perhaps we should first understand why a business would be willing to go the lengths of trademarking?
If we start with what we know: colour is critical to brand identity. A recent study showed that signature brand colours can have a tremendous impact on brand awareness, with 80% of consumers being able to identify Starbucks by its characteristic green straw alone.
Creative teams agree; 44% of designers who took part in our James Cropper Progressive Palettes report said that colour is essential to creating effective brand stories.
While going to the lengths of trademarking might not be for everyone, you can understand the need to protect colour’s role in brand awareness. Take renowned crystal-maker Swarovski, luxury jewellery brand Tiffany & Co., and the emporium of British luxury Smythson, for example. These brands have been uncompromising with their colours; preserving precious brand equity. They have made global uniformity of their brand colour a fine art by carrying relentless precision around the globe, delivering stores, packaging and products that carry a colour which singlehandedly makes them some of the world’s most identifiable brands.
This unrelenting focus on colour is something the coloured paper manufacturers at James Cropper see every day. Companies invest significant time and money building equity around their signature colour palette and therefore want exact matches across all applications, including their papers and packaging.
Our Tailor Made team, who specialises in creating bespoke paper and packaging products, has been tasked with colour-matching everything from a particular shade of red lipstick to a piece of lace on a wedding dress. This demand for impeccable colour matching is why we have an onsite colour lab, we hold around 2,000 live colour recipes for our paper production teams, with some 200,000 colours stored electronically.
Our teams understand the importance of getting colour spot on, as well as the challenge involved in recreating colour on different fibre sources. Looking further at what colour means to brands, almost half (44%) of designers believe that colour is essential to storytelling [1]. By harnessing colour’s ability to evoke emotions, such as trust, happiness and quality, colour palettes can be a strategic way for brands to tell their story, using no words at all.
[1] Research commissioned by James Cropper amongst 518 UK designers, carried out by Censuswide
Related: What's influencing the colours designers choose? A new report has surprising answers.
Unrelenting focus on colour is something we see every day at James Cropper. We specialise in creating bespoke paper and packaging products and are regularly tasked with colour-matching everything from a particular shade of red lipstick to a piece of lace on a wedding dress.Alison Rodwell, colour trend expert at James Cropper
Take a look below at James Cropper’s signature colour story. In the middle ages, Kendal was home to a thriving wool industry, where one of the key materials used was a hard-wearing wool-based fabric called ‘Kendal Green’. As one of Kendal’s longest standing institutions, chairman Mark Cropper felt it essential that our company’s signature colour had an authentic provenance. Our colour lab sourced the original pigments which were used to dye the fabric and were able to replicate that beautiful shade of green in paper to bring it back to life. Both unique and true to our roots, this colour now feels as personal to us as a fingerprint.
The reason behind Deutsche Telekom’s decision to trademark ‘Pantone Rhodamine Red U’ is clear; colour really captures consumers’ attention and allows brands to communicate their stories through even a single hue.
However, colour is universal, and it could be argued that it can’t really be owned by one business over another. Brands with a relentless drive for a progressive palette across all touchpoints will naturally build and protect the brand equity that colour provides. Eventually, brands will become recognised by the colour that, in the eyes of the consumer, is theirs.
Thoughts of Alison Rodwell (pictured below) colour trend expert at James Cropper
