Walk down the snack aisle of your local grocery store and you’ll likely be barraged with all sorts of colors: bright blue on packages of Oreo cookies, canary yellow for Keebler products, and so on. The vast majority of brands purchase these bold hues from a company called Pantone, a global powerhouse that sells standardized recipes for mixing colors. The video below takes an extensive look at how Pantone manages to earn millions for its color combinations without ever selling a drop of paint.
Questions:
- Why do companies around the world depend on Pantone for color references?
- How does Pantone’s virtual monopoly on color combinations affect businesses both big and small?