Color Popularity in Cars

http://www2.dupont.com/Automotive/en_US/news_events/article20061129.html

The above link is an article about DuPont’s 2006 Color Popularity Report, which is the automotive industry’s standard for analyzing and predicting consumer choices in vehicle color. This decade, silver won its spot as the most preferred vehicle color in the world after overtaking green in 2000 and remaining the top consumer choice of color for 7 years. According to the article, the entire world is somewhat synchronizing globally into some mixture of neutral colors with green, red and purple, with network effects driving this information cascade of global convergence.

Some minor background in color is needed to understand the article’s analysis of trends in color preference and why the authors think it is so. DuPont’s trend show last year in 2006 was called “Continental Chroma,” showing a growing emphasis on that aspect of coloration. The chroma of some coloration is a measure of its purity, so when the article cites “high-chroma” colors it means something like pure red, pure blue, etc. On the other hand, there are neutral or “achromatic” colors like silver or gray, which may look somewhat duller. The other terms used to describe coloration are hue (the classification of a color as a mapping to a specific set ~ you can have an “orange hue” for example) and value (the intensity of a color, which affects lightness (tint) and darkness (shade)).

The article describes the rest of the decade trend between 2007-2010 to be a broadening of the range of tones in silver and gray. What this means is that although silver, a neutral color, is the top global choice currently, there are signs of a shift toward cars with more high-chroma intonations even within a neutral color. A top contender to the long-popular silver is a gray with color hues fused in. This fusion is usually with high-chroma colors, and the popularity of mixing neutral with high-chroma colors is fast rising because the “boldness allows for smaller vehicles to make a strong statement.” There is also a general desire by consumers to personalize their vehicles. All these coloration ideas are being shot across the vast network of car consumers around the world. While in the past few years DuPont’s Color Popularity Report has shown (as usual and expected) cultural differences in color preference between different countries, this year in Japan and Korea, the neutral silver emerged as a dominant choice. In fact, most of the vehicle-driving world reports silver as the dominant color, with only European countries that primarily prefer black. This certainly suggests an inter-continental cascade of some sort, as even the Color Popularity Report itself cites that “cultural tastes merge, economies strive for competitive parity and information flows instantaneously.”