There was a time, twenty years ago, when you had a tough time getting a white or cream coloured refrigerator. The growing middle class wanted to display their refrigerator, mostly 165 lt capacity, in their living room. The more conspicuous the colour, the better. But that thirst seems to have been quenched and we don’t see the preponderance of red and blue refrigerators anymore. The variety of refrigerators on display have dramatically increased, to compensate for the loss of colour. Are cars different?
The article ‘Black, blue shine bright for car owners’ [Business Standard 31 December 2024] got me thinking about car colours all over again. It also remined me of Mr Ratan Tata’s obsession with the right colour car for the car launches. I got a taste of this when we were launching the Indigo Marina station wagon in 2004. I was requested to rush to the NCPA to be on call since Mr Tata was wanting to check out the car to be used for the launch event. Two engineers had landed up with the car at NCPA and the marketing team was busy with other arrangements for the launch. Mr Tata decided to drop all that he was doing to check out the colour of the car. But why? As it transpired it was Mr Tata who had suggested to the product team that they should try out a silver coloured car for the launch. The technique of making it was a little complex and several attempts had failed and Mr Tata was not sure if the team would get it right. But they had and they wanted to use it for the launch. Mr Tata, the man who was known for his attention to detail, would not want to miss the opportunity to check out the car once again. I was there to see the interaction between the engineers and Mr Tata. The car did pass the Tata Test and we used it for the launch. The car never was sold in that colour but I remember the incident and have talked about it as an example of how a leader of an organization can inspire his team to think out of the box [Sponge – Leadership Lessons I Learnt From My Clients].
While silver or bright silver was never the colour to be mass manufactured, I do know that silver gray is possibly the most popular car colour around the world. At least it was till the 2010s.
The report in the Business Standard says that white is the most popular colour in India now, though its popularity is dropping [43.9% in 2021 to 39.3% in 2024]. We are not sure how much of this is contributed by the taxi segment. Black seems to have grown rapidly, from 14.8% to 20.2%, possibly due to the growth of SUVs. At one time black Scorpios used to be the trademark cars for political leaders of all heus. Silver, or I suppose silver gray has dropped from 9.9% to 6.7% and this was a surprise. Blue seems to be moving up from 8.8% to 10.9%. The top four colours used to account for 90.2% and this number has moved to 91.2; a small significant increase.
All these four colours are common but in order to stand out brands tend to use one particular colour in their advertising and it is rarely white or silver. At one time we used to photograph the cars in various colours to study how they reproduced; green and blue were a problem. Silver gray was difficult to shoot. All that is now history since most car pictures you see in print ads, websites and brochures are not photographs at all. They are all computer generated images. So you can get any colour you want without worrying about reproduction.
That said there is a lot of fun that can be had with colours. When all personal computers were sold in boring gray and off-white colours it was Apple that launched its iMac in brilliant fruity colours in1999 . While Henry Ford had observed about Model T, he will provide the car ‘In any colour the customer wants so long as it’s black’, brands like Volkswagen Beetle and BMW Mini have used colours to dial up their fun quotient in the global market. In the Indian two wheeler market it was Piaggio’s Vespa that used the power of interesting colours to stand apart.
We saw refrigerators move from boring white to brilliant blues and reds to dial back to white and gray, as the products dropped down the display /brag value scale. I wonder if this is also happening with cars. You are not that worried about the colour of the car as long as the marque is well known. Just as the days when you bought a Maruti 800, painted it in jazzy colours and loaded it with all kinds of gizmos like headlights and mag-alloy wheels is gone, are we getting into an era of boring colours but exciting brand marques?
Appeared originally in Business Standard Jan 2025