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Branding strategies of the blue and famous:
Color this brand positioning blue.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 20, 2002. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 19th that blue is the hot new color for restaurant names. In the past two years, New York has seen the arrival of Blue Hill, Blue Smoke, and Blue Fin; San Francisco has Bloo; and Boston blows in with blu.

The source of this trend may be traced to the Blue Door, the restaurant within the allegedly-hip Delano Hotel in Miami, which opened in 1995. This was followed a few years later with sixtyblue in Chicago, and others such as Blue Hill, Blue Room, Blue Ginger, and Bluehour. Most of these eateries wisely eschew using the color in any way beyond the name, not only because of its environmental coldness, but because it is simply too obvious.

We decided to dig a little deeper into this new blue world, and found other blue restaurants such as Red Hot & Blue, Mount Blue, Bistro Blue, The Blue Lion, Blue Heaven, Blue Moon, Amadeus Blue, Blue Agave, Black & Blue, The Blue Heron, Mt. Blue, Blue Parrot, French Blue, Blue Angels, Uni Blue, Blue Willow, Deep Blue, Zanzibar Blue, Melange Blue, Blue 67, Cactus Blue, Blue Bird, Blue Moose, The Blue Collar Grill, Blue Whale, Blue Spruce, Le Blue, The Blue Owl, Blue Peter's (ouch!), Blue Lagoon, The Blue Boar, Blue Bell, Cool Blue, Blue Mountain, The Blue Marlin, Blue Chalk, Blue Grotto, Blue Diamond, Dharma Blue, Blue Garden, Blue Iguana, Blue Wren, Blue Claw, Blue Muse, Blue Sky, and the Blue Shrimp.

However, no restaurant has yet, to our knowledge, gone to the extreme of serving blue food -- now that would be something worth paying good money for.

Then there's just plain blue, a Hong Kong restaurant that dares to have blue walls and blue chairs to hammer home the theme, which it offers online as an ideal for living:

lifestyle...
it's not about conventional boundaries
it's not about how old you are
it's not about how much you earn
it's not about what job you have

it's a mindset
your attitude in living
your style
your tastes

lifestyle is blue

Have you ever been so devoid of thought as to find yourself wondering, "gee, why do there always seem to be fewer blue M&M's than the other colors?" Well, back in 1999 Muse magazine tracked down the official numbers, and here they are, exposed anew:

Mars, the maker of M&M's, says that it produces the colored candies in the following proportions: 30 percent brown, 20 percent red, 20 percent yellow, 10 percent green, 10 percent orange, and 10 percent blue. The different colors are then all mixed together before packaging. In a perfect bag of 50, you'd have 15 brown, 10 red, 10 yellow, 5 green, 5 orange, and 5 blue.

Only a focus group could have decided that the color brown best represents chocolate.

If you're still reading this, then your drink of choice will naturally be the new Pepsi Blue, a "berry cola fusion":

Prepare for the tricked-up flavor
fusion of berry and cola. Grab a
bottle and get ready to give your
taste buds a buzz of blue.

What is Pepsi Blue?
Pepsi Blue is a whole new beverage
experience - a fusion of berry and
cola that looks and tastes unlike
anything else on the market.

That's "beverage experience," as opposed to flavor, an important obfuscation. If nothing else, with the tagline "I Got Your Blue," Pepsi may win over those looking to score an illegal smile at a Grateful Dead concert.