When customers buy a new or even a used car, the colour they choose reflects their personality. This is none the truer as when one looks at the updated Ford Ranger with its updated colour pallet. Orange sells the dream. Silver sells the tech, writes Ford Motor Company of Southern Africa head of marketing Tarryn knight.
Somewhere in a dealership this weekend, a perfectly rational adult will stand beside a car, catch their own reflection in the paintwork and buy it for reasons they would never dare put on the finance application. Not the torque. Not the residuals. But because, in that particular shade, standing at that particular angle, they looked - how to put it – ‘rather good’. The sensible explanation will come later. It always does.
Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman reckons as much as 95% of a purchase decision-making happens below conscious thought. And the neuroscience is blunter still: Antonio Damasio (the neuroscientist who did more than anyone to dismantle the idea that reason and emotion are rivals), found that people who lose access to their emotions don't turn coldly logical, they simply lose the ability to choose at all. There it is … feeling isn't the enemy of a decision, it's what makes it possible.
Colour and especially bold colour, is designed to make someone stop, look and imagine and to issue the most powerful invitation we have at our disposal. Whether customers RSVP in green or in grey is almost beside the point. Which brings me to the Ford Ranger, and to the colour orange.
Orange is not a neutral choice, and that is precisely the point. It reads as optimism, adventure, courage; none of red's aggression, none of yellow's caution. For a rugged, lifestyle-led pickup it maps almost perfectly. It says “weekend, outdoors, capability by choice”, rather than fleet vehicle bought by procurement. The locally built Ford Ranger is not a domestic product wearing a domestic colour; it is a South African-built vehicle that leaves the line and travels to some of the most different markets on earth. And its hero shade; that warm, sun-saturated orange you see in every reveal and hero shot has to do far more work and go far further than most.
There is a quiet resonance, too, in a vehicle built under a South African sun wearing a colour that looks like warmth, earth and the open landscape. A hero shade that feels like the place the product comes from lends the kind of authenticity money cannot manufacture. The colour and the origin story pull in the same direction: built tough, proven for where it's hot and where it is hard.
Orange behaves differently everywhere it goes. In Australia; a colour-confident market that celebrates bold ‘utes’ - it plays beautifully. In Europe it excites. In the Middle East, how a colour reads under fierce light matters as much as what it says. Colour shows up differently in Munich than it does in Melbourne, or Middleburg.
So, notice what has happened for a buyer. “I was drawn in by the orange because it made me feel adventurous, capable, a little bolder than my commute deserves”. The colour sells a version of yourself, that the spec sheet does not. The feeling arrives first; the talk of capability and resale is the rationalisation that follows it home.
And there is a solid reason why. Most people don’t buy a car to possess a car.
They buy the self they get when they drive it; the capable one, the unhurried one, the one who has (apparently and against all medical explanation) acquired cheekbones. "It made me look thinner" isn’t vanity. It is a person confessing that a product improved their opinion of themselves.
And, yet we insist on treating that feeling as the soft stuff. We have it backwards. The specification earns the trust. The feeling closes the deal. One of persuades someone to fall quietly in love in a car park on a Tuesday, and it’s not towing capacity.
We must stop apologising for emotion. We build truly extraordinary machines and our opportunity is to lead with feelings. Simply put we must let the substance do what substance does - reassure. We must lean into letting the feeling do the seducing.
When a customer explains, in language that appears nowhere in the brochure, why they truly bought; we must listen. That is not noise to be tidied away, it is the most valuable expression they will ever hand over.They got the orange one because it made them feel bolder. They got the green one