Can you manufacture a viral colour?

Some of the world’s most iconic companies and cultural figures, from Mattel to Taylor Swift, have leveraged colour to boost brand impact. But how do some shades go viral while others fade fast? Hannah Bowler reports.

To promote his new movie, Marty Supreme, Timothee Chalamet posted an 18-minute Zoom call with A24’s marketing team, where the actor pitched painting the Statue of Liberty, the Egyptian Pyramids and even the Taj Mahal a shade of “corroded, rusted” orange. The video, shared to Instagram, might have been a parody but it speaks to a strategy increasingly adopted by marketers to use a single colour to create a cultural moment.

The inspiration for Chalamet’s branding concept? Barbie. “When you think of Barbie, what do you think? I think pink. Everywhere I stepped, I’d be inundated with pink,” he said. Then Chalamet asked, "What would the same be for Marty Supreme? Orange.” In the film, orange is the colour of Marty Supreme-branded ping-pong balls. While they only feature a couple of times on screen, they signal the protagonist’s egotistical side as someone always wanting to stand out.

In the past couple of years, several major viral colours have emerged, including Barbie pink. Brat Summer turned a harsh, flat shade of green into a cultural movement. The Pantone 3570 became a shorthand for an attitude; it was anti-gloss, anti-perfection and messy. A year after Charli XCX released Brat, Taylor Swift attempted to make ‘Portofino Orange’ a big moment to mark her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl. Although brands like Glossier and Dunkin’ jumped on the bandwagon, the colour didn’t capture the cultural moment in the same way as the Brat album phenomenon.

So what actually makes a colour go viral? Can brands plan for it, or does virality have to be culturally earned?

Understanding the psychology of colour

Anyone in branding who hopes to orchestrate a viral colour moment needs to first understand the psychology of colour and how humans interact with it at a societal level.

Wayne Deakin, the former executive creative director of Wolf Olins and now founder of Studio Deakin, believes colour has been an extremely “powerful force” throughout human history. He cited historical examples, such as the association between purple and power in Julius Caesar’s Rome and Mao’s use of bright red to symbolise communist rule. “Colour is a force because it comes with all of this cultural meaning. It is codified in your brain from a very early age throughout history,” Deakin says. “If you want to engineer a colour to be viral, you have to understand the colour is a system and not a swatch.”

To Deakin, it is less about the colour itself and more about what the colour represents. Brat green resonated because it stood for something deeper: it was a rejection of unrealistic standards of perfection and the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic. There is normally something going on in the wider world that creates the conditions for a colour to go viral.

Colour virality is ‘culturally earned,’ not manufactured

As Chalamet has previously pointed out, ‘Barbiecore’ is one of the strongest recent examples of a viral colour moment. For the makers of the movie, Warner Bros and Mattel, they couldn’t have planned for a better campaign. Mattel’s chief design officer and global head of toy innovation, Chris Down, says that the popularity of ‘Barbiecore’ caught the marketing team by surprise. “You can't really force virality; something catches fire and it goes,” he says.

He says that the colour pink has been culturally earned by Barbie over its 65-year history. “Colour alone isn’t ownable; its power is created through its association with the brand value we’ve established over time,” Down says. The Barbie brand means something to people and culture – “possibilities, optimism, confidence,” according to Down. All of that meaning is then channelled into the colour. “Then the association of that colour becomes the handle that consumers grab onto,” he says.

Very few brands have the power to use colour to transmit all that meaning. “Barbie is one of the lucky ones. But culture decided that, not Barbie,” Down says. Colour is used as a strategy to play an “outsized role” in conveying brand value across Mattel’s portfolio, he adds. Berry is the colour of American Girl, green is the colour of Polly Pocket and blue is the colour of Hot Wheels. Here, consistent branding is key. “We’re creating a level of consistency to telegraph the brand value over time, so it becomes a core palette for each one of our brands across the portfolio.”

Planning ahead versus chasing the mainstream

For brands hoping to capitalise on a colour moment, there are all sorts of trend forecasting that can guide them. Pantone’s Colour of the Year is the best known. According to Pantone, a colour is selected each year that is “able to communicate the colour message that best reflects what is happening in our global culture at a specific moment in time.” Pantone 11-4201 Cloud Dancer is 2026’s colour, picked as a “symbol of calming influence in a society rediscovering the value of quiet reflection.”

Last year, Pinterest forecasted that Cherry Red and Butter Yellow would be big trends in its annual Predicts report. Spotting an opportunity in colour forecasting for brands, the platform recently debuted its inaugural Pinterest Palette report.

Vice president of Pinterest House of Creative, Xanthe Wells, says the Palette report “exists to give brands early clarity on where colour demand is heading – so they can plan ahead, not chase what’s already mainstream.” To forecast, platform search data from its 600 million users is blended with consumer behaviour research and “curated” by in-house trends experts.

However, Wells tells brands to handle trending colours not as “instruction” but as inspiration. They’re “signals of bigger moods and aesthetics,” she says. For example, for the 2026 forecasted colours, “Cool Blue can signal calm focus, Plum Noir brings depth and drama, Wasabi injects electric energy, Jade feels grounded and elevated, and Persimmon is joy-forward and bold,” Wells says. Understanding what a popular colour is signalling is much more integral to a brand than the colour itself. How brands can then “build lasting value,” Wells argues, is when they "integrate these signals in a way that strengthens their own visual identity”. 

Adopt the colour early, not late

Daniel Bennet is a behavioral scientist at Ogilvy Consulting. Like Deakin, he believes marketers and designers should understand social identity theory before incorporating a viral colour into their campaigns.

As senior partner, head of behavioural science at Ogilvy, he says the challenge for brands is picking the right moment. When a person or a brand goes in early, it sends a “non-conformity” signal. It comes across to consumers as: “I'm unique; I'm doing something different. I really must know this trend because I've used those two colours first – that goes down well with the ‘in’ group,” according to Bennet. But come out of the gate too late when there is colour saturation and it can give a negative signal of trying too hard. “The people that go early look natural and authentic. The people that go late look like they're copycats and it's a less authentic signal,” Bennet says.

Another way to come across more authentic is to expand the campaign beyond the paint brush, Bennet says. He illustrates his point with the Wicked: For Good movie release in 2025, where all manner of brands adopted the pink and green colour palette into their comms. “The brands that did really well were not the brands that just put the colours up, but those that put together deeper partnerships,” he says. Starbucks created limited-edition drinks Elphaba's Cold Brew and Glinda's Pink Potion. Puma dropped a Wicked-inspired Speedcat collection, while Le Creuset even teamed up to release green and pink cast iron pots, a nod to a witch’s cauldron. “Those brands created products and reframed products they already had, showing a deeper signal that they are the partner,” Bennet says.

Don’t chase the colour, understand what it represents

Viral colour moments can’t be manufactured in the way campaigns are briefed and delivered. They emerge when a colour captures a mood, signals belonging and gives people a simple way to participate in culture. For brands, the opportunity isn’t to chase the colour itself, but to understand what it represents.

Those that move too late risk looking opportunistic and those that move too early without cultural credibility risk being ignored altogether. The brands that benefit most from viral colour moments are the ones that don’t rely on them. They build long-term equity, clear values and consistent visual worlds, so when culture aligns with their palette, the connection feels natural rather than forced.

 

This article was taken from Transform magazine Q1, 2026. You can subscribe to the print edition here.