Why Should We Care About Pink?

Tech guru Kara Swisher was on the news last night wearing a bright pink shirt. Asked why, she said she had just seen the new Barbie movie.

With Barbie, pink has a become a brand.

Barbiecore

Seeing these pink suits, we think Barbie:

But, this Burger King burger is Barbiecore too:

Displaying the power of consistent branding, every Barbie image is pink. According to Today, we are talking about Barbiecore. Barbiecore embodies hyper-feminine bubble gum pink clothing. For the film, director/writer Greta Gerwig got it down to 10 shades and reputedly even created a paint shortage. As a result, wearing hot link suits, pink pillbox hats, or flying in a pink rocketship, the pink cannot be overdone. It is the brand.

Our Bottom Line: Competitive Market Structures

The people at the Pantone Institute of Color help companies use color to compete. By naming a new color each year, they reflect and create a trend. This year, echoing Barbiecore, Pantone selected a hot pink called Viva Magenta. Also calling it an animated red, they say the color is assertive but not aggressive, Suggesting that we wear it with “other pinks,” it can be on our hair as tips and also on our lips. In our homes, it can be a velvet couch or a lacquered wall.

This is the Viva Magenta palette:

As economists, we can return to a scale of the four basic market structures:

Moving from perfect competition at one end to monopoly at the other, we see firms increase their size and pricing power. However, on the scale, Barbie is somewhere in the middle. Because she is closer to monopolistic competition with many other toys, she had to differentiate herself.

Consequently, she needed pink.

My sources and more: Seeing Kara Swisher in pink, again alerted me of the power of color. It reminded me of past Pantone posts and the importance of their 2023 color of the year. From there, Today had the Barbie facts.

Our featured image is from Pixabay