green-vox | WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE.

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UPS has that brown.  DHL that yellow (even claiming it as the new brown).  UPS the purple and orange.  Coke mythology has its own red living outside of Pantone's purview.  These are "owned" colors.  Or, keeping it in  a linguistic framework, these are Signs which we interpret and comprehend. They are as good as -if not better than-words.

What about Green?  Who owns it?  No one, arguably and that may be part of the problem.  Anyone can apply a tint of green to a new brochure in an effort to appear eco-friendly (I swear there is a post coming about hyphens).  What we think needs to happen is a change up.  True Green companies need to stop using it.  There a ubiquitous quality about the color nowadays, and that may end up hurting the environmental movement in the long run.

By the way did anyone notice the name of this blog?  We're guilty too.  But it proves a point.  The color, or Sign, of Green is still a shortcut.  But with any shortcut, we may miss out on the journey itself.

Maybe Steve Case and LIME are doing it.  Maybe they got it right.  But more interesting is his REVOLUTION - not a drop of green in the joint.  After seeing him speak at LOHAS1o last year, he certainly is market-wise.  He understands that his market is not a green consumer, but a wealthy investor who may be turned off by too much green.

We think Larry Bird would make a great spokesperson for a new green company. 

A single word.

Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss said that "It is likely that languages exist in which an entire myth can be expressed in a single word."

Brands do it faster than that.  No words are required, but a language is.  The conditioning that goes on for brands to work is just that: conditioning.  In nike's case, it is a high-frequency stories of success.  Can a brand exist without conditioning?  Does "brown" instinctively  mean UPS?  No. 

Saatchi & Saatchi has the cheesy "lovemarks" branded brand branding concept.  In it they claim that "lovemarks are the future beyond brands."  We think what is more important is the conditioning that must come first.  Some conditioning may live in a morphogenetic field or collective unconscious, but that's just pre-conditioning, alligator brain stuff.  Things we can understand but not control.  Brands can be bought or earned, both brand strategies work in the short-term.

We think that the "future of before brands" is a more informative methodology.  What conditions must be available for brands to "stick"?  Familiarity (frequency) + Trust (authenticity).