Color In Marketing: Yahoo Goes All Purple

No, it's not some sort of uber green that Yahoo has achieved, it's just another marketing campaign.

We all have our favorite new marketing campaigns: the ones where companies do seemingly unrelated things to boost their street cred and show everyone they care about things other than money and you buying their products...

I will be quite the branded color palette if I add purple to my yellow live strong bracelet, my white ONE campaign bracelet... I think the orange campaign is done now that the Olympics are over, so that should free up another article of clothing. I could put my pink back on for breast cancer awareness... I certainly can't use magenta anymore, thanks to t-mobile... Man, I better start grabbing up some colors of my own before people start to think I'm a billboard for an NGO or tech company even though I won't actually have any visible company names on my clothing, just colors. I might not be wearing the names of designers but with they way things are going fashion labels are sure to buy up black any day now and then where will we be.

In such a campaign, Yahoo has launched a new web portal as a base of their new “Start Wearing Purple” campaign about being purple. Purple, as yahoo says, is the color of "creativity and innovation" and has been a part of their corporate identity since it's beginnings, even though I thought they were red, but who goes by logos these days when companies are filling the streets with purple bikes that record a photo every 60 seconds to capture the bikes journeys on a flickr account, or get funny people to do funny things with the color purple, both of which are a part of yahoo's purple campaign. Other highlights of the campaign include: daily purple links, a store of purple wears, purple pranks, and so on.

Yahoo's purple campaign is a another in a 'long tail' line of viral marketing campaigns where companies hope to create advertising that is, well, not really advertising but content provided by an advertiser. It's seems to be more like sponsoring an event your customers might be interested in, where you can make it apparent that you are interested in that too. Really, it is kind of like dating your customer. You want to show you have an interest in their interests, or at least that you're open to their interests. You want to provide a welcoming environment into your life, all the while creating excitement and unexpected delights for spending time with you. Also showing that there might be more interesting things to come in the future, when in reality you've already spent your budget on dinner, those tickets to Cirque du Soleil, purple golf shirts and purple bikes for everyone in the office, and after all that, people still don't know what it is you actually do, only that you like the color purple.

More Purple Branding

Drink Purple

Set up on a social mission to help the poverty- and violence-ridden country of Haiti, or so the site claims, Purple was developed as a product to increases the quality of life through sales for the Haitians, and for all people who consume it. There doesn't seem to be a reason behind their choosing purple for their branding listed on their site, though presumably it is based on the color of the fruits that make up the ingredients of Purple.

The Purple Store

ThePurpleStore.com only carries products that are purple. Enough said.