The Bottom Line of Color with Anat Lechner

In this episode you may learn how to rationalise your color choices through data and statistics, a requirement ever more important when working with large businesses. Anat Lechner will explain how she ended up in the world of color and how her business perspective on color helps the creative industry today.  Anat believes we need to first understand color before we can apply it, let alone use it to drive business decisions. Her company Huedata gives you the necessary background information to make well-informed color choices based on true market data. 

Anat Lechner, PhD, is a Professor of Business Management at the Stern School of Business, New York University where she focuses on disruptive leadership, innovation, and strategic change. She’s also the founder of Huedata Inc., a color intelligence company. A former Research Fellow at McKinsey & Co. Dr. Lechner has advised to global Fortune 100 firms in the Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals, Energy, Food, High Tech, Design and Retail industries. She’s had numerous appearances on the NYT, WSJ, BBC, ABC, Forbes and other premier global media outlets Anat holds an MBA and a PhD in Organization Management from Rutgers University, NJ.

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Transcript

Judith van Vliet: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Color Authority. This is Judith van Vliet podcasting out of Italy. Milan. I'm going to be talking today to Anat Lechner. She has a PhD and is a professor of Business Management at the Stern School of Business, New York University, where she focuses on disruptive leadership, innovation, and strategic change. She's also the founder of HueData Inc. A color intelligence company. As a former research fellow at McKinsey and Co, Anat has advised the global Fortune 500 firms in the financial services, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food, high tech design, and retail industries. She has had numerous appearances on New York Times, BBC, ABC, Forbes, and other premier global media outlets. Anat holds also an NBA and a PhD. Indeed, in organization management. From Rogers University in New Jersey. Good morning, Anat. And welcome to the Color Authority. How are you today?

Anat Lechner: Good morning. Thank you for inviting me. I'm good. I'm excited about our upcoming talk. It should be interesting to talk about color.

Judith van Vliet: Color, and then also, I think, just a little bit about yourself. Obviously, people just heard also your biography, what you do, and we were just chatting about how our lives were so different.

Anat Lechner: Right.

Judith van Vliet: How we are both born in different countries and then we moved to different countries, and how all of that has an influence on who we are, what jobs we have, and how we look at color. So that's another reason why I look very much forward to this conversation. Me here in Milan, and you are currently in Tel Aviv, Israel, right?

Anat Lechner: That's correct. It's how things unfold this way.

Judith van Vliet: It is, exactly. Yeah. So one of the first questions I ask everybody, just like a warm up, and that is also for you. And that's what is color to you?

Anat Lechner: The first thing that comes to mind to me is mystery. This is the very first thing. It's mystery. It's mystery because I don't know what the world looks like if it's only black and white. So what's the added dimension now that color brings? It's mystery because my relationship with color started because of that. So the first time I really paid attention in a more, we'll call it dedicated, serious way. I'll take you back to a very dreary library, 97. I'm writing a chapter in my PhD dissertation, which is about how companies innovate. And I happened to study innovation in a paint company, which, when I was invited to do this work, I did not think much about innovation in a paint company. It wasn't a trivial choice. In fact, I was trying to study it in a pharmaceutical company, which kind of, to me, made more sense, given my background as fate wants it. I find myself in a paint company, and then I sit in the library and I have to justify why I studied innovation in a company that does paint, of all things. So it's before Google, it's before everything. Right. It's just when the continent starts to separate, I think. And I go and I pick a book on industries because I have to describe the paint industry. I go to the value, the volume of Pea pharmaceuticals, petroleum, whichever. Otherwise, hundreds of pages written on the industry. When I flip to the paint industry, there are three pages in this. This is a very thick book. Three pages. I'm thinking, oh, my God, I'm going to work so hard now to kind of beef up the story, right? And the volume starts with colors and everything, and yet we know so little about it. And I'm sitting there. It's a really gray what I remember is a very dreary environment. Gray day, all rain, just terrible. And I'm thinking about it. I stopped there, right? I'm schooled. I've studied philosophy and all that. So these ideas trigger me to think. I'm thinking, what else is in everything? And yet we know so little about that. What else is in everything? Love is in everything. We know quite a bit about love. Teeth is in everything. We kind of know a lot about dental issues. Sand is everywhere. We know quite a bit about that. What does it mean that color is in everything? And if we know something about it? That started my affair with color, which is not just love affair. It's a dense affair. And so it's a mystery. And it is still a mystery even though I've spent now 25 years trying to demystify it.

Judith van Vliet: It's interesting. You come, indeed from, let's say from all the people I've met in color, the most do come still from a design background. You come from the business background. That's very clear. So that was what triggered you. Right. Because there was not a lot known about you were just like, Then I just need to learn about this. I need to find this out. Was that the reason why you really entered color?

Anat Lechner: So then the next layer on this exactly. You're exactly right. Given I'm thinking business most days, right? Most of the time. Most of the days I'm thinking, but we react to color commercially. As consumers, we react to color all day long. I would not buy the car that I drive in if it wasn't for the color that I liked. I wouldn't buy anything if it wasn't for the colors that I like. And if I dislike the color, I just don't buy it. So I'm thinking, how do people make these color decisions commercially? If we know so little about color, then how do these decisions get made? It's one thing if you're a Van Gogh and you decide to whatever your composition is, right? It's another thing if you're a Zara. How does that work? And I started to pay attention. I have my business clients, the pharmaceuticals, the car industry, the banking industry. I started to pay attention to their color offerings. How do they package themselves? But it was lame. I didn't have a benchmark. I didn't have a framework. I didn't have a strategy. I surely didn't have any data. So I was just observing it for a long while and thinking on this and to the point that you're asking on, it was the interface between color and business that triggered me. I didn't come to it thinking aesthetics per se. I didn't come to it thinking history of color revolution, or surely not the mechanics of making color accurate. I didn't even know to say all these things that today I'm very fluent in the color conversation, right? Or the color speech or speak. But it wasn't my case back then. So I was just looking at the interface between color and business. And that's what triggered my increased interest in this.

Judith van Vliet: And then you found it HueData, which you data a couple of years ago. You found it HueData together with your partner. And it seems indeed to be one, well, a service in the color industry for indeed professionals such as obviously also myself to consult selecting the right color for their products based on indeed data statistics, something that is really there, going beyond the emotional side of you liking it or depending on how your mood is that day. Can you a little bit explain what exactly that service is that you're offering?

Anat Lechner: Yeah. So I have to take you back for a few minutes and just kind of show you how the idea evolved because it came out of something right as it was pretty much everything else. So from 1997 into 2007, I'm studying color. I'm beginning to talk about it in conferences. I'm beginning to formulate an idea about color strategy, which to me is a hybrid between the world of color and my world as a strategic business person. Thinking on how do we make decisions on colors, what are the benchmarks that we need to consider, what is the use case, what are the personas we are designing for? How do we think on the cultural context in which they exist, what's the context of the product? Is pink in cars the same as pink in nail polish? And questions of that nature right and back. And then no one speaks on data. That's not even a conversation in the business world, let alone in the design world. But you ought to think more. I'll call it methodically on the decision making process. So I learned that color has a manufacturing issue and it's not always consistent. And so some colors are consistent and others are not. I learned about personify the offering. I learned about the cultural context. But I started thinking on where is the data to make these decisions, where is the research foundation, what are we basing the decisions on? And it's not until 2067 when a company that's coding pills for the pharmaceutical industry is giving us a call and they have a question. And the question that they have is we are approached by Pfizer Merck roche. All the pharmaceutical companies that, by the way, are all my clients, right? We're approached by them to help them design a brand for their new introductions. So Pfizer will come in and they will say, we are introducing a drug for the target audience is Men, age 50 to 70. It's for heart condition. It's meant to communicate that the drug will be fast acting, reliable, and also slow release throughout the day. So it's released fast acting upon release. It's slow release throughout the day. It's targeting this constituent and we're going to launch it in ten jurisdictions, the five big in Europe, in Asia. We're going to go to China and to India and Japan, and then we're going to launch it in Canada and the US. What color should it be? Now, this company is based in Pennsylvania. They can do all the colors. They don't have any problem producing whichever color you want. The question is, which color should it be? So it'll communicate these attributes in all these cultural contexts for this particular audience. This is not a decision that can be made based on I like it, or I dislike it based on, oh, I have good experience with green, but I like those deep shades. It does not work this way. So they come to us to have us answer this question. We don't have data back then. And so we launch a study. It's a very expensive study. It takes a year and a half to from A to Z, and eventually we have an answer that comes out of 2007, largest in sector study was published, was referenced. I started to think on, is there a better way? Because in the business world, we never.

Judith van Vliet: Have a lot of time.

Anat Lechner: Exactly. We never make a single decision without data, and we're never going to spend so much time collecting it. We've already built it in so many domains of the business space and no one will make a decision based on I like it or I don't like it. And if they do, they risk their career at times. It just not flying. Now I'm thinking, so the designers that are in the business world and are designing for people who need to consume it, are they not subject to the same set of dynamics? It's like a bank manager needing to give you an advice on where to invest your portfolio, isn't it? The same set of dynamics. How do you rationalize your decision? So I'm back and then doing another project with IBM, the team that's built Watson for IBM, which is the big data engine, right. And I'm thinking we should build a database for all the colors and commercial application so people can see they can see what happened in fashion, they can see what happened in the car industry, they can see how people brand themselves and what are the logos in which industry, for which company. They can get informed whether or not they are going to use it to then finalize the decision is up to the designer. But the designer can then rationalize or the decision maker, the color decision maker, it's not always a designer. It can be a designer. It can be a merchandiser. It can be a marketer brand agency so far that people can rationalize why they chose the colors that they did. And so, as is the utility of any database, there are three values that come out of a database. If it's good, assuming the database has integrity to it. Right. It's the ability to inform a decision. It's the ability to inspire a decision. Oh, I didn't think of that option. And it's the ability to validate the decision. I'm thinking of an option. What's my reference to validate it? So I can help you inform your decision, I can help inspire your decision, and I can help you validate your decision. And out of that came a very long labor of building, or kind of process of building the new data entity, because the complexity of building it is enormous.

Judith van Vliet: I can imagine is enormous.

Anat Lechner: So I can take you through that if you're interested. But maybe that's I don't know how interesting that is for anyone to listen on. But the complexity building a database is the art of structuring the unstructured. That's actually what that is. Right. And color is inherently unstructured because the entity called color is fluid, is dynamic, is all encompassing, is impossible to parse, is impossible to delineate. We make arbitrary choices on when red finishes and say orange begins. These are arbitrary calls, objective. It's very subjective. It's contextual. I mean, there are so many reasons why this unstructured space is so difficult to structure. It's in the domain of the intangible, emotional, philosophical, fluid, societal, blah, blah, blah. Lots of words. All of which tells you it doesn't lend itself to an Excel spreadsheet. Exactly.

Judith van Vliet: People who come from my field don't tend to like Excel or Data.

Anat Lechner: Exactly.

Judith van Vliet: We don't tend to be good at it. I remember mathematics that was going through high school. It was just a disaster.

Anat Lechner: I know. But you see the interesting thing and I appreciate it myself, by the way, even coming from the business world, I'm on the top side of the business world, and I didn't like mathematics either, nor was I particularly successful in this. But because of the complexity of everything that we're doing right now and the complexity of the world that we're trying to participate in, effectively, you got to work with other people who speak different languages, not necessarily English, Dutch, and so forth. Right. But some people do think in data, and some people need to take your decision and rationalize it within a different context. So they need to make sure that the products that they enter into the market actually have a business case for them. And color becomes 80% of the decision to buy something. Right. Color becomes a very important criterion. So if you have no data to make that decision based on, how are you thinking?

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, because rationalizing color, that's what you're helping brands with. And then so many other people, I mean, that is a topic for all of us. I mean, I even had a conversation about this yesterday with one of my clients, talking obviously about color. Now, we as professionals, we know why we pick a certain color, and we do the storytelling. We do our data. Maybe not data, but we do tend to do our trend research. We do look upon to statistics where possible. But indeed, convincing clients, internal or external counterparts is not easy. So how do you take let's say let's just take a brand that needs to figure out the new color form or needs a validation for a certain color on a given product. How do you take them? Let's say by the end, how do you help them do that?

Anat Lechner: Yeah. So there are different ways and different approaches. I'll anchor this in a quick story of a company that came to us, and they are in the cosmetics business, and they were looking at a new nail polish line, which they introduced every six weeks or so. The pace of that is tremendous. And they asked us a really interesting question, which was, where does the new color begin? How do we know? So you're talking about trends, right? How do we capture the trends? How do we know where color begins? And color can begin in Haut Couture in Paris. And color can begin on the streets of the Favelas in Rio. And color can begin in some talk, crazy talk on social because of the dress that changes its colors. And color can begin today. Color can begin by influencers. Color can begin in multiple places. So the ability of a single mind to actually stay on top of all those domains and continuously corp them, it's just impossible. Yeah, exactly. It's impossible. And I have to say that educators, as I am as well, are the same as designers. We come from a world where our work is craft. So the methodology behind it, the ability we want to stay informed. We want to stay relevant. It's important for us to be solid in the consultation that we provide and again, be able to rationalize it. And so we do the work of reading and informing ourselves and going to shows and all that. And in many ways, this is the 20th century way of working. We just didn't graduate out of it. To add. So it's just like, think on your grandfather's banker. They did exactly the same thing. They sat on top. They read the Wall Street Journal or whatever financial Times to stay on top of the trends. So when your grandfather came to the bank to ask where to invest, they were able to give them an advice which was informed, but the information from which they drew, their advice was actually very limited. And today this issue is on steroids because there's so much information in the world, it's impossible. So how do we take a client or a person that are interested in getting to an answer? What can we offer? We can offer you an analysis of, say, 30 years of fashion. You can follow a single designer. You can follow a bunch of designers. And when I say follow, think, Google, you click, you put a query into the system. You get an analysis. You don't have to go and see what Gucci did over the past 50 years, which in any case you will not be able to do. You will not be able to find out what Gucci did in the past 50 years, or 30 to be maybe more precise. But for me, it's a click. And I can tell you exactly what but she did all the shows analyzed to the RGB or the hex value with LAB value, whichever value you're working with, we can reference against any value and yes, whatever, right, any notation, but it's a click away. And I can show you where Gucci stood out with a shade of whatever orange when no one else did. And then I can show you how this translated into everybody went orange a season later. So I can find those influencers within fashion because I have historical data and it's all structured, analyzed, visualized, and I can manipulate it whichever way I want, as is the case with any data, your health data or any data. Right. So I can take you through that. I can take you through all the data that I grab from social media. Anytime somebody mentions color, I have it in my data. So it's a worldwide up to the minute data. So if you need to launch something for an audience in the UK whenever in the next month or so, I can give you a sense of what's the call sentiment.

Judith van Vliet: So you get really localized color feeling data.

Anat Lechner: To the extent that I can draw that from social media channels with some people have their profile that I can grab an analyze location, which I guess most people, then I can tell you these are the comments that are coming now from the UK. And these are the comments that are coming now from the Netherlands, right? I can be a whole lot more granular and most importantly, comprehensive and real time.

Judith van Vliet: You gather all that data. I mean, obviously it's machine learning, I get that. But 50 years ago, how do you do that?

Anat Lechner: So you have to identify the sources from which you can grab data. For one, that's legit to take, right? Or else partner with data providers to give you an example. It's absolutely legit to grab data from Instagram or from Twitter or from Pinterest and to run sentiment analysis on this, because we have the algorithms that can do that. So you know if it's a positive comment. If it's a negative comment, you know the location of it. This is easy to do, relatively speaking. If you know how to do it, it's easy to do. You can grab data from news. You can identify your influencers. You can decide who you trust. You can go and grab the logos of companies or the car shows or many sources. I have a new data today. They don't fashion that goes back to the 80s. They don't cars that goes back to the previous century, deep in the previous century. Data on logos. That is about a million data points of companies logos around the world, classified by industry, by company's age, by company size. I can analyze whichever way I want the names of colors. How many times you struggle if you introduce a new color, right? You're a painting company. You introduce a new color, you have to call it something. Right? People struggle with this. Right?

Judith van Vliet: Sky blue again.

Anat Lechner: Yeah, exactly. Funny thing is you don't even know that you're saying it again because you think you might be right. Because sky blue, somebody must have thought on this. Right? Perhaps you can consult. We have 1.5 million names in the database. So if you want to know what the shade of pink is called, I can tell you. So the depth of the data so.

Judith van Vliet: It inspires and it has depth of the data.

Anat Lechner: Yeah, the depth of the data is enormous. The breadth of the data is enormous. We keep it up to date. So anytime new data enters fashion has Fashion week, car has car shows in years to them, right. Logos do not. So you have to kind of, like, take a look every now and then on what's been added, because new companies are coming. All companies are going. So you got to stay fresh this way. I have all the arts back to the 13th century and all the way.

Judith van Vliet: To today, maybe even more surprisingly, because art goes back to well, literally. I mean, we can't even go back to that era. So I guess that you can get all the data because as soon as the Internet existed, that's when you can start gathering and then all that data from before somebody has to enter it.

Anat Lechner: The beauty of this is there are people that entered all the data on the colors of birds. I have it. There are people who entered all the data on the colors of butterflies. There are people who entered all the data on the colors of flowers.

Judith van Vliet: So passionate people about a certain topic, they wanted to share information. I can gather that.

Anat Lechner: And I gather that either through collaborations or people open their API so that you can utilize this data, data with permission, data that you can use. The issue here is to identify the sources, to identify what do you even want to talk about? If it's cosmetics, if it's cars, if it's nature if it's space, right? Identify what you want to talk about, identify the data sources, identify the building relationships to actually grab the data, and then the work begins. This is not the work. This is pre work. The work is to structure it within the database, is to read the data correctly and then to analyze it, and then to visualize it, and then to put analysis that are for the user to run so the tools with which the user can run this. So it's like Google when they were founded, they were founded on the idea that they will organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and usable. That's their raison d'etre. That's their vision true. And for us, coming into this, it was easy for me to take this idea and think on it within the context of color, organize the world's color information and make it universally accessible and usable. So just like life before Google forced you to experience the world the way you experienced it, you grew up in a certain place. You read the news that was your perspective on the world, that certain place, and the news that came to you the way they were dish to you. Can you compare that with your experience today as the person who lives in the world of the age of the Internet, the age of AI? It's incomprehensible how much of a shift.

Judith van Vliet: It's impossible. And I think that's why people are so confused as well. And what I'm seeing a lot is people who do color trends, which I'm one of those, and many of them are now, everybody tends to be doing it because color is big, color is huge. Everybody has understood the power of color, and everybody can do color or color trends. And I think that's where it gets so confusing. And that's also how a data service such as yours can at least create, let's say, in the end, a bottom line to the inspiration, to the aesthetic part. Because one thing is rationalizing color, but where does that leave the emotional part for most people that are listening are designers. So how do you balance that?

Anat Lechner: So the beauty of this is it's funny how I think we know that the world is some sort of kaleidoscope experience, right? Everything is mirrored in everything else, right? So we, again, artificially say, you're in the design space, I'm in the business space. At the end, we're in the space of making sense of our lives. It's just a different way to do it, right? And inform and inspire our lives to go to a better place. So in the business world, you will show someone data, and then they can make a decision where they want to take it next. And that's the beauty. You don't start from nothing. You start from a very robust something, but it pushes you we'll call it inductively, not deductively inductively. It pushes you creatively to a new place. So if I show you we were starting to talk earlier on, say, a company that wants to brand itself or rebrand itself within, say, financial service, I can show you within a click what the financial service industry looks like, what are the colors people are using in their identity, how are they grouped, what are the popular colors, how many colors in the logo. I can show you all that and I can show you how financial service industry looks against all other industries. So you can have a benchmark. But then if financial service industry is primarily blue, which we could anticipate anyways, right? Then you can decide for that brand that you rebrand or put in the market. You as a designer, you can make a decision. Am I going to go with the shade of blue because I want to enter it into the milieu, I want to enter it into the common understanding of financial services and I want to capitalize on what's already built? Or do I want to differentiate from them? And will I differentiate within the blue family to a different shade? Or will I differentiate altogether and I'm going to become your new TMobile with shocking pink coming into communicate a different set of attributes. And by the way, on the platform you can also see which attributes are connected with the colors that you're proposing because we have a 10,000 studies in the back and forth that too. So you can stand on a much safer ground making a decision which at the end is your creative decision.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, but at least it's backed up. Yeah, I think that's what a lot of people are in need of. Hence also indeed me being so interested in getting you on the podcast, you just mentioned blue. And so when you work for clients generally, they always want to know what color will attract people to my product. Like do this what is the most universal color likes in color psychology? And I think we all know blue generally universally seems to be depends on which type of blue again, but as a color family it tends to be one of those colors that tends to be enjoyed. But then again, it depends on the product, it depends on the research that you still have to do. How would you help a customer doing that? Or for example, are there other colors that are according to your research, I also widely accepted.

Anat Lechner: Yeah. I'll say to you this one of the results of a study that we did years back shows that primary colors usually are connected with primary emotions and so primary emotions so in the world of emotions, you can think on primary emotions, secondary emotions, treat sharing emotions, the primary emotions of seven are considered to be universal emotions. So we all have them, we all know what love feels like, we all know what disgust feels like or fear. Primary emotions. Blue is an interesting color. Because it doesn't connote a lot of negative emotions. Red, on the other hand, has a duality to it. It's about love and it's about fear. It's about anxiety, it's about hate, danger. Yeah, exactly. So this call, for instance, which is universally accepted, triggers this duality. And you need to understand the tonality of it. If the blue undertone will make it a whole lot more pleasant, a whole lot more pinkish, a whole lot more lovable. Right, so we have data on this, we have research on this. It's not a lot of research, I have to say, but it's there. Then we can do the numerical exercise of just looking at what people love within an industry. So I know it's based on the colors they chose for their identity. And if I showed you the profile of industries, it's going to be shocking to you that all industries, with very few exceptions, are primarily blue, black and red. These are the colors. Now, are they particularly like? I don't know that this is a question of like or dislike. It's a question of how people believe they should appear in the world.

Judith van Vliet: What about familiarity? Almost.

Anat Lechner: There is familiarity. There is pragmatic considerations, such as the standout. So, as they say in the branding age space, you can never go wrong with a black, white, red combination. From an identity standpoint, you just can never go wrong. Right. And so it's clear, it's precise, it's commanding. The contrast between black and white is sharp, is clean, it's elegant, it's professional. And these have become values that the professional world globally is subscribing to and aspiring to. In that sense, it's not even a discussion of like or dislike. It's just a question of how do I believe I should show up in the world? But blue, to be more precise, is cutting across so many identity designs. Not so much, by the way, in cars, not so much in fashion, unless for menswear. But blue is not necessarily a trending.

Judith van Vliet: Color in fashion, unless its jeans. But, yeah, we can talk about jeans whether it's truly blue or not.

Anat Lechner: Exactly. Not so much in nail polish, although recently there is a blue nail polish, but this is not necessarily a common color. So to the point you're making earlier, it's very contextualized. It's a question of within which context in which products? We know that blue and food is a big no no because of the connotation of mold and all that. So it's impossible to actually answer this question intelligently without parsing to what product? It's a strategic question to which audience, in which market, with which product? That's the question that any strategy answers, and color strategy for that matter, answer the same question to which audience, in which market, with which product? And within that context, we can make sense of the code choice that from that point onwards, it's very easy, relatively speaking, because the data is there.

Judith van Vliet: That was exactly my point. And that's why I asked that question, because I just wanted to debunk that myth, which you just perfectly did.

Anat Lechner: Indeed, it's debunked. It's easy, completely.

Judith van Vliet: No, in the end, with data, everything is completely de-bunkable, of course. But for us, we have been working in color for so many years and there are people listening that have been working in color over 60, 60 years even. And as I said earlier, it's become a hype. Color is a hype. I already know I'm starting to see the first design for Milan Design Week. We're seeing already that colorful expression is huge. It's increasing popularity on social media. You can see everybody's doing color. I mean, even now, Shutterstock, Getty Images, Pinterest, they're serving us color preferences. What is your sentiment on that compared to also your service that you're offering, but also just generally what's happening on social media, on color fields?

Anat Lechner: I think that if you think of the movement in the world and it's more I'll say you have backgrounds of this from political sciences. I think if you think of the movement in the world, which the Internet brought a lot of this to the west side of the world especially, but not just of self expression, the ability to participate as a unit of one in the world. Right. Once upon a time you were Dutch and I was Israeli and we were belonging with a bigger cluster and then we were our companies. And now we can be a persona of one that shows up in the world and has a voice and has followers and has identity to it. And one of the most important, and by the way, easiest ways to have a voice is through your self expression, through color. So the explosion of that, right, so you stand out, you own a color. I always toyed with the idea of giving you the ability of naming your color in my database. Right? So that's going to be your color and we'll just call it yours because we can, because color is endless. So why not giving people ownership of the color they most love? So owning the color and owning the color identity is one aspect of it. Of course, we can go to the lamest corner now to say, well, Pandemic hit us so hard and now we want a little bit more joy and all that. Maybe there is a little bit of that as well. But I think that the platform just allows you to express and the expression on these platforms is voice and visual. So I think that's what triggers a lot of it. Whether or not other people offer sentiment analysis on color, I think that's great. I think it takes us to begin to kind of we call it trade color in a more informed way. Another question is how informed do you actually want to be? Because lack prefers the preferred mind. So do you want to be well informed? Do you want to be well inspired. I'm just going to give you a quick example since I read all the art that existed in the world and literally all the art as captured by the moves and few other museums around the world, and we're talking about 3000 pieces of art, I can tell you what's the palette of Van Gogh versus Jackson Pollock versus Frida Kahlo versus whoever. So when you do your design work, there's so much inspiration that can come from looking at the color combinations that those masters of color have put in place, which gave them the status of being a Van Gogh.

Judith van Vliet: And it's there for you to enjoy.

Anat Lechner: And it's there for you to enjoy, and then you can contrast it with how it comes in nature, because that perhaps was their major source anyways, right? There was no social media. And then you can contrast it with the colors on social media, and then you can contrast it on the colors that came from fashion. And you can now sit within that space and ask yourself, so what's next? And tap that white space that comes from all these very colorful areas. This is a lot more than just color sentiment. So there's a question on how much information do you actually want? And it's good that we have different services at this point where we can elevate the conversation and we do not need to stay. We don't need to be alone in this. The decision of making the color decision, as a designer, you would know it is a heavy decision because it's risky.

Judith van Vliet: Yes, it is.

Anat Lechner: And so you don't need to be alone in this. My grandmother was a physician back in then. What data existed in the Forties and the were just books. You read them when you studied, you got your degree of you want to heal people, right?

Judith van Vliet: And you tried and you tried your.

Anat Lechner: Best, but you were very lonely. And if you didn't fix it right, that guy could have died. You don't need to be alone in this, and you don't need to replicate that behavior, which is there for many designers and still the behavior. I'm just going to read a little bit on what's going on. I'm going to read a lot on what's going on. I'm going to spend endless hours on the Internet trying to make sense and pull from my in Yang and all those reference points something into a mood board. This is from yesterday. It can still serve you, but you can do a little bit more than that. The question is for you to decide how much information you need.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, and also with all the let's say there's a lot of data online, that's not necessarily true either about color. So this is also a way of filtering it.

Anat Lechner: Yes. Because color, this is partially at one point, I decided I'm going to go and grab all the research on color. It's published so all the research has never been published on color. I just want to have it in one place parsed. So I don't need to say, oh, people basically love this, and the rest we don't know. This is a lot of gossip. The color gossip is called right. We have no idea if it's true or not. The methodology is used. If you look under the hood on many of those claims, you will see how empty they are. They're empty.

Judith van Vliet: That's true.

Anat Lechner: And so they came in a time where we had nothing else, but now we have something. Yeah.

Judith van Vliet: And people want the backbone of research and of choices being made. I went to your website, of course, and you have a very fun part. An interesting part is about global color emotions, which I think generally the cultural part behind color is like a whole different part. And then a part called unicorn. Seriously? Why is that?

Anat Lechner: No, it's an index. So I'm thinking on again, going back to the business world. The trend setters in the business world are the unicorns because they're showing us the possibilities of the 21st century because of the use of technology. So they're showing us what does it mean to be global and what does it mean to be technology savvy and what does it mean to be online, what does it mean to be in the metaverse and so forth. Right. And I think that looking at how they dress themselves up, how they themselves look, is going to give us the freshest view on company's identity. So we created the Unicorn Index, where you can just take a look at who are they, not in terms of what they do, but in terms of their color. Right. How they package themselves. And that keeps getting updated because unique ones are continuously being added. There are young people that drive young, generally speaking. Right. That kind of drive, I think, the new us. The new and the new me. True.

Judith van Vliet: Now I got it. Interesting. Very interesting. Obviously another great topic. Is it's the Metaverse?

Anat Lechner: Yes.

Judith van Vliet: I launched a podcast just this week with a crypto art curator who obviously also debunks some stuff on the Metaverse. And nobody knows where this is going. Nobody even knows where it's going to end. We did not know with the Internet either. But you already are seeing colors being used for the metaverse, right?

Anat Lechner: Right.

Judith van Vliet: Can you a little bit give some background on that?

Anat Lechner: Yeah. So we actually audited the colors of the metaverse not too long ago. To get it sent. We published just a few infographics on this. In my book there, I'd say very few classes of innovation that are really interesting. There can be product innovations, there can be some sort of technical innovations that color has, technical innovations. I can tell you some examples of this and that's of interest. And then there is a business model innovation and the metaverse is a business model innovation. So all the colors that once upon a time had to eventually drill back to real, tangible products no longer needs to be real and tangible. And that's the unbelievable beauty of that, right? So they can be whatever you want them to be. And the colors of the Metaverse look like our best understanding of the sweetest dream we could possibly have. They're very vivid. They're very vibrant, the color combinations. They are very dynamic. They radiate dynamism, which is fun. American light and fun. Yes, exactly. In many ways, if you think on this more, I'll call it maybe socially or anthropologically, there is a whole group of people now that is entering into this age easily because they already are in Fortnite and already are in the central land and already are on Roblox and already are on all the platforms of the Metaverse. And so for them, this is their color experience. Now, you want to tell me what J. Crew sweater they want to buy? So they are not going to go for the solid, boring colors. Their understanding of the color environment in which they are nested is vibrant, slowly and quick. This is where they are. You've seen the fashion house is now launching on the Metaverse. Right? Balance. Quite a number of people have done runway shows. They do sometimes exclusively on the Metaverse. Nike has a Nike Land. These colors are trendsetters. They're kind of giving us an understanding of what that reality that doesn't have a physical face to it looks like, and to the point you made earlier on, how much of a color explosion exists now on social and just in general, that's going to get exponentially so on the Metaverse, because the Metaverse is now new ground zero for new innovation. Right? So every person that walks onto the metaphorically, of course, can create whatever they want. There is no physical limitations.

Judith van Vliet: And what you then see is that in, let's say, my color communities, we're trying to grasp that. We're trying to understand it. We understand it, but still people want to translate it. And I think that's only certain generations, I myself and just a millennial still going on, on exercise, we tried to translate it to the real world. And that is, I think, in my personal opinion, that is a mistake.

Anat Lechner: Yeah, it is a mistake, because you.

Judith van Vliet: Can and that's the whole point. Right?

Anat Lechner: That's exactly right. There's a question of can you become a designer for the Metaverse? And just that and just what you'll do exactly. And whether it's even going to be needed, because, you see, that's another issue. So my take is it will be needed. It's a different type of service, but it's kind of down the road. Down the road, when you have your own place to decorate in the middle verse, you might need help of a designer who knows how to think on creating ambience, which might not be your ability to think on. And since the opportunities are limitless, this is overwhelming for most people, but still want to look good, and they come.

Judith van Vliet: From the real world, like the physical world, and they design for the physical world.

Anat Lechner: Exactly. So the issue here for a designer, in my opinion, is to commercialize not the physical assemblance of colors, but the aesthetics capacity, the capacity to create aesthetic environments and or else purposeful environments from a color perspective. So, for instance, in the physical world, we always deal with the question of what should be the color gamut for or the color combination for a hospital so that it will induce healing. What might that be in the virtual world? It's a question of the aesthetics, of creating that purposeful environment in a place that's limitless, that doesn't have any commercial consideration to it, in the sense that I cannot reproduce this color, or it's very expensive to reproduce it none of this.

Judith van Vliet: Or longevity. Like I need to be looking at this for the next 20 years.

Anat Lechner: Exactly. It's a switch, and we're no longer looking at this. So somebody has to be the color strategist that will tell you how fast to retire colors. Maybe you should have a daily appearance. It's limitless. It's laminal and limitless. Right. Laminal, in the sense that it goes between physical and virtual and limitless, because virtual is limitless. That's the brilliance of the metaverse. The set of considerations have to be on aesthetics and purposefulness and not so much on anything else.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, it's a topic that I think most people can never know enough about. Hence, also, indeed, it's coming back in many conversations, but also many conversations. In the podcast, we talk about the future of color, where color is going, or let's say, color innovation. And we just clearly mentioned that the metaverse is about color innovation as well. But do you believe there's other color innovations that are of interest currently?

Anat Lechner: I'll give you an example of something that I was looking at and published on just recently, which is brilliant. People from Harvard and MIT developed an ink that you can put into a tattoo, and it reflects blood sugar level that you have now. This is a brilliant way to take color. And again, it's not on the aesthetic side, although it's beautiful, and you can, of course, beautify it as much as you like.

Judith van Vliet: It has purpose, true purpose.

Anat Lechner: It has purpose. And that purpose is supremely innovative, unique, and so helpful because it gives someone real time, analytics, so to speak, on their health, on a universal problem so many people have. So color can go there as well. Color can blend more strategically into other domains of our lives, in this particular case, health. The conversation we just left was on color innovation that induces healing in a hospital environment or learning in a learning environment, or tranquility in a hospitality environment or eating in a restaurant environment. For instance, research shows that if you put food on red plates, people eat 43% less. Okay, so we can marry color with other intents.

Judith van Vliet: I'm in red place by the way.

Anat Lechner: Exactly. Research shows that if I gave you  a M & M, for instance, in ten colors versus seven, you will eat a whole lot more M and Ms because of the color variety, because it becomes a little bit of a game. Oh, let me try this one, let me try this one. If it's all the same three colors, which is going to eat a whole lot less. So if you think on the candy industry, which needs to be curbed substantially because of sugar, until we find something that might be almost a regulatory issue, do you want the population to become increasingly more obese or do you want them to, if they do try candy only have a few. But the regulator has no clue that this is even identified as a thing. If they knew, maybe there was a marrying of intents that are purposeful at the societal level. So where color should go next is color should become color is a vehicle. You got to ask yourself, what are you using it for? So in the earliest days, people have used it to differentiate and people have used it to sell more essentially in the commercial space and in the art. It was just expression of our perception of life. I don't know if there are other utilities to it yeah true today, because we can be so much more informed. And I'm not going to claim that your data is the Holy Grail, but your data takes us one step deeper into becoming more informed. Then you can make color intense. And it's not just going to be to sell more, it can be to heal better. For instance, in the way people take drugs, there is a huge compliance issue. People are subscribed different medicine and they don't take it. If the color is appealing to you personally, you can actually take it. If the drugs that you take came in ten calls opposed to one, you may actually end. This is the same drug, it's just a little bit more playful, you might actually take it. So we can be color can serve a grander purpose. For sure.

Judith van Vliet: I think that is exactly. And it's so funny that you're coming from a business background. I've talked to people who do color therapy, collar, gnostics.

Anat Lechner: I've talked to people who do color.

Judith van Vliet: For chocolates, for pastries architects. But in the end and all the conversations we're seeing that we want to be using color to create a better world, not to sell more.

Anat Lechner: Yes, exactly. And today, because we finally have at least this platform, and I hope there will be additional platforms that are coming up, a way to structure the unstructured. Okay. If color is unstructured as a phenomenon, we now have a better way to structure it. Once you have a way to structure something, you can better understand it. Once you have a way to understand it, you can utilize it. You can utilize it purposefully. If you don't understand it, you can't use it. So you will be forever lame. Despite all the efforts that you will make, you will be forever lame. It's just like the human body. You don't understand it. You can't do much with it. You understand it. You can become purposeful. That's the transformation that people like myself are trying to inject into the color world. And I'm not alone in this, and I'm not going to have the need to be alone. I think that together, we can advance it. So it's now on people like you and I to bring new methodologies and to educate the next generation designers to use different tools and expand their view and their vision and purposefulness.

Judith van Vliet: That's also in the the exact reason why I started this podcast, by interviewing people like you with different points of view and to make people understand more what color can do, the power of color, but also so many different aspects. And I'm very sure that people were inspired by you and indeed what you do with your company. And I could keep talking for hours, but I really want to thank you for this conversation, and I hope that together, indeed, we can bring more knowledge to the color audience.

Anat Lechner: Yes. Thank you so much. It's a big fashion of mine, as you can see now, and I'm exactly trying to do that. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. So thank you for the opportunity to speak on this with you.

Judith van Vliet: Thank you, Anat. Thank you for listening to my episode with Anat and talking about the business side of color. Now, in my next episode, I'm going to be talking to Leslie Harrington. Leslie Harrington is really concentrating on color strategy, but we're also going to be talking about the future of color. And not just that. We're going to be talking about the future of color forecasting. So stay tuned for the next episode, launching in two weeks time. Now, for those of you who haven't done so yet and you're listening on Spotify, please go to the show review and rates. Same for Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening to this podcast. Feedback is always welcome. So let's know what you think of our episodes, what you think of the show, and I wish you a great rest of your day.