How bland can brands get, anyway?

Take cars, f'rinstance. And something simple: paint color. 

The nice folks at @iSeeCars have been tracking the color of all new models for a while.

In the past 20 years, bland cars — black, white, gray, silver (aka gentrified gray) — have gone from 60% of all new cars to 80%. Yowza! 

White cars are #1, having nearly doubled from 16% to 28%.

(I mean, they do get less hot in the summer, and commercial fleets like them.)

I'm sure there's some chicken-&-egg between what car makers make and what buyers wanna buy.

But this tastes like the blandification of logos we've seen in the past 10 years. 

(Fiat boldly decided to stop selling gray cars last year. "WE'RE ITALIAN! WE LIVE VIBRANTLY! CHE SORPRESA!" Bold choice to not sell the 3rd-most-popular color.)

Some lessons:

🍊 It's hard to be different.

🍊 Category norms suck in everything nearby like a black hole.