From Marty Supreme to Barbie: The Art of Color Association in Marketing
Before an audience hears a line of dialogue, color has already begun telling the story. When branding media, color operates as a silent language that shapes emotion and expectation in an instant. These carefully curated palettes do more than establish visual identity. Color emerges, not only as decoration, but as a strategic and expressive art form central to branding in modern media.
Color is a cultural shortcut, which is especially evident in recent films. Long before viewers process plot, genre, or message, color cues them on how they are supposed to feel. It functions as a visual language that everyone in the audience can experience. Pink signals playfulness, fantasy, and femininity; orange suggests energy, chaos, and visibility; green evokes power, envy, and otherness. Not all of these meanings are inherent. Many are socially learned, built through decades of repetition in media, fashion, and advertising.
In a recent Marty Supreme marketing video, Timothée Chalamet and the film’s promo team unpack their hope that the movie’s visual identity will work the same way Barbie did with the color pink. Chalamet asks the group, “When you think ‘Barbie,’ what do you think?”
Answering his own question, he says, “pink everywhere.” He then pivots to Marty Supreme, proposing a signature color for that film. A distinctive, hardcore orange that is bold enough to dominate public presence, just as Barbie pink did in 2023. The color choice is rooted in the story itself through the orange ping-pong ball that Marty uses, but the joke and strategy go further. Chalamet suggests over-the-top ideas like painting landmarks orange and deploying branded blimps, all in service of building an instantly recognizable visual identity tied to one bold hue.
Fronted by Chalamet, the film’s marketing made orange impossible to ignore. From public appearances to special clothes, the team built this momentum deeply – like Barbie did a few years ago. In the video, Chalamet is quite literally “dreaming big,” and by doing that, he became the first person to stand on top of The Sphere in Las Vegas, which was transformed into a giant ping pong ball to promote the movie. Timothée and Kylie Jenner wore custom Chrome Hearts in the signature orange color, which gained insane levels of traction and even a Vogue article.
By repeatedly using and pushing the specific orange across digital content, public appearances, and stunts, the campaign turned a single color into a signature move rather than a stylistic choice. Marty Supreme shows us that the excessive use of a color makes it stop acting as a background and become a part of the brand.
Wicked's marketing campaign has achieved something remarkable in the realm of color and brand recognition as well. The movie has successfully claimed ownership of an entire color combination. Between the release of the original and the sequel, the pairing of pink and green has become so intrinsically linked to Wicked that these hues alone can instantly bring the brand to mind, even without accompanying logos or imagery. This color association has been leveraged across a diverse array of product collaborations, from Crocs and color-changing mac & cheese to luxury candles, laundry detergent, and even vodka.
By consistently deploying this distinctive pink-and-green palette across hundreds of partnerships, the campaign has reprogrammed perception, turning what were once just two colors into a shorthand for an entire entertainment phenomenon. The use of color in Wicked’s marketing strategies helps prove that, when executed with enough saturation and consistency, color association can beat traditional advertising and become a form of cultural currency that requires no explanation.
When color transcends decoration to become identity, it achieves what traditional marketing cannot: instant, wordless recognition. What seemed like simple aesthetic choices for movies turned out to be cultural claims, staking real territory in the marketing world. In an oversaturated media landscape where people are bombarded with thousands of pieces of information daily, color cuts through the noise with primal efficiency. This is the new frontier of branding. When executed with total commitment and cultural timing, color does not just support a brand, but becomes the brand. These recent successes prove that in the attention economy, the most powerful marketing tool might be the simplest one we have.
About the Author: Kellen Cox is a 1st year student at the University of Oregon studying advertising and public relations. Kellen likes to write about pop culture, the media, or whatever he’s currently interested in.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kellencox40812