Yellow is Number One

I asked Karen Jones, DHL's veep of advertising, about the color choice, and whether it was a direct response to UPS's now-famous "Brown" campaign. Surprisingly, she said it wasn't. "I hate to burst anyone's bubble," she says. "But yellow and red were the colors chosen by our headquarters over in Germany. We really can't take any credit for it here in the U.S."

Karen did say that the colors were selected "to convey energy and entrepreneurialism ... for the boldness and assertiveness and confident tone" of DHL. Then she added: "There's a joke internally that Dick Metzler, our CMO, used to like to say, which is that 'Yellow is number one and brown is number two.' But that probably doesn't bear repeating."

Sorry, Karen. I couldn't resist.

What's impressive, though, is not so much that DHL is on-trend with its color choice, but that, like Lance Armstrong, it staked its entire identity on a color. In a nation where states are classified as red or blue and where every team, school, and horse farm has its colors, it's really quite remarkable that so few brands have color coded their marketing strategies like DHL and Lance Armstrong.

How many can you think of? JetBlue. Too easy. Big Blue. Does anyone still call IBM Big Blue? Tiffany Blue. American Express Blue credit cards. That's not many right off the top. And all of them are blue! I'm sure you can think of others (Red Envelope -- but you know, that's really just Tiffany's blue, except in red). I can't think of any more right now and that speaks to the potential. A whole spectrum is up for grabs.

Yellow wakes me up in the morning.

Who knew?

Maybe there's hope for Microsoft and Apple after all.

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