Cues for hues

Have you ever stopped to think of how colour determines your purchase decisions? Why you buy a silver car but a blue phone and yellow bathroom tiles? Why you chose cream walls two years ago, but experiment with orange today?

Latika Khosla, a National Institute of Design (NID) alumnus, has spent the last 15 years studying just that, and she is helping manufacturers apply the fruits of her study. She says, "Colour may not sell a product, but the right colour will sell it faster."

Khosla and her firm Freedom Tree have made colour their business since 2002, with a vision to prescribe colour and styling directions for various industries.

"There are plenty of design studios doing colour research limited to logo design and branding, but nobody in this country does regular visual auditing of people's colour preferences.

"A company once said to me, our South Indian customers like dark red. In Tamil Nadu dark means a colour with high black content, whereas in Kerala it's a high intensity colour, so what do you mean when you say dark red?" asks Khosla.

She feigns confusion and flips through her extensive colour charts.

She says, "We work best when our intervention is not a response to an immediate sales crisis. It can take up to two years to put a successful colour plan in place; colour is not a last minute decoration to a product line."

A few years ago, Parryware had a bit of a problem. Their product prices corresponded to their levels of colour intensity, and their most profitable range "" the level 3 colours "" were witnessing declining sales.

These colours happened to be the darkest in their sanitaryware offering. What they hadn't cottoned on to was that the Indian aesthetic had changed to fresher colours, fresh pastels. The dark shades were suffering; they had painted themselves into a corner.

Khosla collapsed their price points and phased out the unviable colours. As part of market research, she escorted the Parryware team to pubs, malls, shops and furniture stores for ideas on customer's environments.

"Colour referencing is a proprietary technique we use. We record the tones of the colours available in the market in industries related to or having an influence on the client product," she says.

Sometimes, insight comes from colour watchdogs like the American-born Colour Marketing Group (CMG) and the Pan Pacific Fashion Colour Conference (PPFCC).

Taking cues from technology, the economy, politics and entertainment, various stakeholders from the design head of Hewlett Packard and fashion buyers to product developers from Nokia and LG, meet and combine their storyboards to make big brother colour predictions, called colour futures.

These published forecasts are then made available to companies who base their colour decisions on them.

Another survey keenly followed by car manufacturers all over the world is DuPont's published Automotive Color Popularity Results. But even while following trends, Khosla recommends there is room for taking calculated risks.

In November last year, along with an exterior and interior facelift for the new look Chevrolet Optra, Khosla added Mystic Satin (silver with mauve highlights) to the colour offering.

Within two months, it reached sales parity with their silver option (According to the DuPont survey, silver is traditionally the best-selling car colour).

"From the time when a paint company told me 'we sell paint not colour', things have changed. Over the last few years Indian companies have realised that they are just a commodity in the market place if they only offer a competitive price point. The product has to be design driven," states Khosla.

TI Cycles for one believes thoughtful design will help accelerate the marginally growing children's bicycle segment.

Says Mohit Khattar, vice president-sales and marketing, "The teenage consumer is extremely choosy and the feedback we've been receiving lately is that the consumer is looking for distinctive colours and snazzy design."

That's when they looked outside their capabilities within the organisation and brought Khosla on board. Against the backdrop of a declining cross-segment market for bicycles, Khattar believes the stylish new teenagers bike to be launched sometime next year will offer great product differentiation.

So how costly is it to hire a colour diviner? Says Khosla, "We call it aesthetic efficiency; I may charge you Rs 2-3 lakh, but you will lose more in inventory costs if your product doesn't sell."

Agreed, it can't be easy diverting pigments imported for a particular shade of, say, blue, to the production of some other colour.

"We have a lot of work ahead of us", she smiles, "after all, people are still testing shades by rubbing lipstick against their wrists."