The grass is always greener, as they say, and so are cigarette packets. In Australia, at least. The country's MPs are set to back plans to render cigarette packets olive-green, supposedly because it's a dull, unappealing colour that will put off potential smokers. But will it work? Perhaps. Green-branded firms – BP, Starbucks and Carlsberg, to name three – may be successful, but are hardly adored. Everyone hates BP, everyone loves to hate Starbucks, and Carlsberg is forced to beef up its brand with the hopeful slogan: "Probably the best beer in the world." Coincidence? Possibly not. Some magazine editors even swear green covers don't sell well at the newsstand.
In the cigarette industry, green has long been considered drab. Raymond Loewy's re-branding of the Lucky Strike packet from bland green to the white-black-red version we know today was "one of the great transformations", says design critic Stephen Bayley. "Sales picked up enormously." But, he warns, green may be ugly, but not always off-putting. "Thing is," expands Bayley, "ugliness is an unreliable deterrent. It's actually very difficult to design something ugly. Usually it only happens by accident."
And what does the Green party think? It may have won its first seat last year, but could it have done better with, say, a vermilion logo? Ochre, maybe? Au contraire, says a spokesman. "Green is associated with regeneration, good luck, generosity, harmony and well-paced energy. Have you ever noticed that time moves faster in a green room? In contrast, TS Eliot used yellow to represent the decay of the modern world, blue is linked to sadness, and red with anger." Green with envy? Not the Greens.
