Without looking at the picture below: What color is the Discover Card brand?

Do you know how hard it is to take a picture of a credit card edge without getting any numbers in the frame?

Orange. Right.

I wouldn’t say they own the color, necessarily, but Discover Card (the brand) is orange, just like American Express is green, MasterCard is red and yellow and Visa is yellow-orange and blue. Clearly, a Discover Card doesn’t have to be orange to be recognizable because the logo takes care of that, but references to orange help to strengthen the brand.

Plastic Makes Perfect

It should come as no surprise perhaps, that this Discover Card has a bright orange edge. I’m pretty sure the substrate on which the design has been screen printed is actually orange, (although I’m really not interested in cutting it in half to check).

What I mean by that is that, much like a piece of black matte board which is black all the way through, and not just two pieces of black surface stuck to an inner layer of a different color, I’m pretty sure this whole card is printed on solid orange plastic.

Yeah? So?

Clearly, the use of orange reinforces the brand but the orange edge on this card serves another, subtler yet extremely valuable purpose. I find this amazing because it’s one of those design solutions that are so basic and so simple that they are incredibly hard to imagine. I mean…who would ever think the edge of a credit card could be useful for anything except scraping the ice off your windshield, picking your teeth or jimmying open stubbornly locked doors?

To appreciate the brilliance of the orange edge, let’s take a look at the Discover card in it’s natural habitat, nestled snugly between my library card and driver’s license in my beat-up, yet trusty wallet:

The Discover Card in its natural habitat

Pretty easy to find the Discover Card, isn’t it? I wonder how many extra transactions Discover lands each year simply because credit cards look exactly the same when you’re trying to distinguish them using only the edge.

Very cool design work, Discover Card. Two thumbs up.

Brandsinger has a very astute insight on the real difference between Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks posted today.

The flaw in Dunkin’s campaign is the premise – that competition with Starbucks is “all about the coffee.” If that were true, you could sell a great cup of joe straight from a garden spigot for LESS money and make a fortune. No, you good-hearted Dunkin’ bozos. It is NOT “all about the coffee.” It’s about Starbucks’ creation of an urban refuge in a menacing modern metropolis.

He’s right. Starbucks isn’t selling “better coffee.” It’s not better. They’re selling a warm, infinitely customizable experience built around getting a cup of coffee in which actually drinking the coffee is only a part.

Until the Starbucks customer is attracted to the idea of spending an hour skimming the paper at a Dunkin Donuts, no amount of quality in the coffee is going to win Starbucks’ customers away from Starbucks.

I suspect that the Dunkin Donuts quality campaign is aimed less at winning new customers away from the high end competitor in the space and more at reinforcing the brand identity with the people who are already loyal Dunkin Donuts customers.