It's like recently, color returned as the latest visual bonbon / marketing fad in the advertising industry (certainly thanks to Apple's iPod campaign, which started it all). More and more companies are using color as a means to express the various realities of their brands, and also help the consumer express its own personality through the product: You have Adidas with their Adicolor product / campaign, Sony Vaio with their new multicolored FJ Series laptop, Sony Bravia with their "Color. Like no other" ad with the little balls, and many other companies who, through use of color differenciation/color advertising, bring some freshness to their brand.

Is it a metaphor for suggesting a certain "escape from reality", "change from the usual", or simply "difference"? Has our world become so gloomy and dull that we need to be reminded about colors in our lives, and how they bring beauty? Can we see some sort of subliminally suggested desire for global reconciliation? Is color a contemporary icon used to define modernism?

I don't want to go into a multi-chaptered novel, but I definitely see grounds for analysis, here. There would be a very interesting sociological study to produce about the sudden surge of COLOR in marketing today.

Some will say it's not actually that new - Benetton did it in the eighties with their "United Colors of Benetton" campaign, encompassing all the connotation possibilities cited two paragraphs above. While it was a communicational phenomenon, it wasn't representative of a tendancy. Nowadays, color seems like it's spreading as a communication and marketing device.

Here's another TV spot celebrating color, from Infiniti, titled "Perform beautifully".

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