Signazon Spotlight: Lee Eiseman, Pantone - Part 2

This is part 2 of our interview with Pantone’s Lee Eiseman. In case you missed it, you can check out Part 1 here.

Lee Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute, is one of the most influential and experienced color consultants in the world. 

And it's easy to see why. She's behind Pantone's Color of the Year, the one of the most anticipated color announcements each year. Along with her work at Pantone, she consults with companies around the world, offering color advice to big names, such as Best Buy and Ikea. She's also author of several books on the subject, including Pantone: The 20th Century in Color and Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color.

A few weeks back, we were lucky enough to sit down with Eiseman to talk color. In this interview, she explains what makes color is so influential, how to choose a color for your brand, and just how color has evolved through the years.


Why is color so influential on consumers’ buying decisions?

Well, color is an emotional decision, whether people recognize it or not. You're often drawn to a particular piece of clothing or an accessory, because the color speaks to you. Obviously the cost, the design, the shape, and all the other things enter into the equation, but color is often the reason why they are attracted in the first place to a given product. People will often go back to that first instinct that they had, that they really loved that object because they loved the color.

When working with your clients, such as IKEA or Best Buy, for your consulting business, what's the general process you use to determine what colors work best for their needs?

We question our would-be clients, and we ask them questions such as who is their target audience? What are their feelings about the products? Why this product? What is the product’s message? We look at competitors, and as well as the price point - that's an important consideration. We need a really thorough understanding about what the product is all about, because there are no magic bullet answers with color. We also want to know if they have done any marketing at all that might inform us, but they’re not always necessary.

Some companies are working on a level of "Well, our graphic designer tells us we should be doing this.” Or “My boss's administrative assistant likes this color." [laughs] It's astounding to me how many personal reasons go into why color choices are made and in the world of business that has got to go. You cannot make it on "I hate purple" and "I love green." It's amazing, but I hear managers of departments say that to me, as the reason why they're not going to choose a color for a particular product.

I tell my students and my clients the same thing: You have to learn how to separate your personal likes and dislikes from your professional likes and dislikes. You might hate a color, but if it’s right for your product in the particular context that you're going to use it in, then get over it, you know? [laughs]

You’ve got to give up on “I don’t like that color.” It can’t be about old prejudices. People who were raised during the early 80's, when they see the color mauve, it's “Oh my god, the carpeting, the living room, and the bedroom.” It was a sea of mauve, teal, and silver gray. You have opinions that are formed because of different times in people's lives where maybe that was happy, and they love that color combination. Or maybe they didn't. Maybe it got very old to them, and every time they see that color combination it says early 80's. But we’re living in a time that values nostalgia and retro, so even though you may not have a personal memory that's a good one, in today's market, mauve might have relevance.

If you could give one piece of advice to someone choosing colors for his or her business, what would it be?

It’s based almost entirely on the psychology of the color. A company has to evaluate what image they want to convey to the buying public, their intended customer. Who do you want to be? What do you want to represent? And then you go for the color that best exemplifies that feeling. At the same time you have to look at what the competition, because you don't want to look like you're trying to knock somebody else off.

Maybe you've chosen to go with a blue, because you've read and researched blue and you find out that you know blue is the color that is the most steadfast in people's minds - it's a constant, it's always there, and it's loyal. You know all the things that you want to get across to a consumer, but at the same time, your closest competitor is using a blue. Obviously you don't want it to be exactly the same blue that they're using. You might want to bring trends into it, to an extent. If the blue that they're using is the same-old navy blue that everyone has used a gazillion times over, then maybe you want tweak your blue so it looks more current, a little more unique, a little different, and yet still imbue some of those basic ideas that the color blue gets across to people.

Have you seen colors change through the years in marketing? Any trends?

I can give you a particular example. We get our information through color word associations studies, and in the late 80's I started to notice a trend in the brown family. To be clear, some colors remain steadfast. Red is always going to be excitement, dynamism, sexy, and arousing. Red is not going to change, because it's so deeply embedded in the human mind, that that's what red says. So you're not going to make it a calming color overnight.

But take a color like brown. For so many years, brown was always about the earth. End of story. However, when the marketing of chocolates started to be important and then the marketing of Starbucks with all these coffees coming out and these neighborhood places that you could go to and sit with your computer and meet your friends, brown became the new lifestyle, a way of life. It started to be elevated beyond just an earth color. Brown started to take on a much more sophisticated connotation. It's not just about earth anymore; it's about drinking a wonderful espresso or eating a Godiva chocolate. That put brown in a whole, new perspective, and ever since then, we now have more than one meaning around brown.

So, it's a long-winded answer to your question, but yes, you can change concepts about what a color means and says. That's also why you have to do your homework and make sure you're getting it right, that you're not discarding a color just because the conventional wisdom says you don't use it in that way. You've always got to think of the context of the color - how and where you've been using it.


Learn more about Lee Eiseman and her color consulting business, visit www.colorexpert.com. For more information about Pantone and the 2014 Color of the Year, see www.pantone.com.

Images courtesy of Pantone LLC.  

Page Authored By Rick Debus