Plum

An article today in the Times discusses the implications of the trend of businesses naming products and services after the color/fruit "plum."

Lots of associations with plum are tossed around in the article. Plum the color is said to evoke royalty, sophistication, emotion, individuality, class, calm, cleanliness, health, vitality, and purity.
Plum the fruit, in its literal form, is described as connoting sweetness and naturalness. But most of the discussion of plum the fruit centers around its metaphorical connotations, which have to do with something highly desirable and elite -- "something you strive for" -- such as a "plum job" or "plum assignment." One CMO quoted in the article mentioned the sayings "sweeten the deal" and "juicy deal" and noted that "in many societies, plums are given as rewards or gifts."

The article doesn't do much to relate all these various connotations of plum together in a way that explains the zeitgeist of the trend. What's missing is a theory that relates the creativity and hedonism of the color plum's meanings to the business-speak, achievement-oriented overtones of plum the fruit.

My theory is that this "plum" trend is all about the convergence of commerce and art in marketing. With art's makers priced out of cities and its products priced out of the budget of most consumers, art for art's sake is a less and less viable pursuit. The tide is turning, and aesthetics is ceasing to be an end in itself and beginning to be a means of "making special" Western culture's main socially shared significance: capitalism. Consumption is now the most meaningful way for an individual to participate in the group; modern self-transcendence takes place through transactions.

The growing sophistication, beauty, and pervasiveness of marketing are evidence that advertising is fast becoming the art of the post-postmodern age. Plum is the perfect motif of this evolution because its multiple meanings as color and fruit encapsulate the hallmarks of the ascendant superrich whose purposes are served by consumer culture: their obsession with luxury; their equation of creativity with entrepreneurship; their monopoly on self-realization; their status as the new royalty; their ability to afford health and well-being; their power as patrons of the arts.

Plum is very much a business branding trend -- not a fashion or general aesthetic trend. The author mentions this point only at the very end of the article, in a bit of a throwaway. But I think it's quite significant, as it points out the exclusivity of "plum." Plum is not for the masses; it's for the rich, creatively-entitled elite, and in a type of self-enforcing sumptuary law, it will not be glimpsed outside their world.