That walk past Orange Julius yesterday also reminded me of a little-known story I read recently regarding sight-sensory branding, and o
ne that would surely make Bugs raise a brow. According to Martin Lindstrom, whose book Brand Sense is a favorite tome on the topic, “Carrots once came in every color but orange. There were red, black, green, white and purple varieties. Then sometime in the sixteenth century Dutch growers decided to give this root vegetable a patriotic edge,” breeders began developing an orange variety in honor of their monarch, William I, the Prince of Orange, “a country with an orange flag now had an orange carrot.”
And what a supremely missed brand opportunity this turned out to be – how many people who eat orange carrots today know that it all ties back to some genetic dice rolling in the Netherlands, let alone the Prince of Orange?
Posted by: Colin Mangham