as someone with a background in marketing, can you speak to why (to the untrained eye) GT APPEARS to be different than their competition? Even if you have no inside info, what is your best professional opinion? Why are we having discussions about what are colors are/aren't given that we having been at this (sports) for awhile now? As far as I know (and I don't visit other message boards at all), GT seems to be alone in our confusion as to what our colors are and what our uniforms should look like.
I don't have inside info, but my opinion is that I agree with jgtengineer - it is a lack of brand control over the past 30+ years. GT is very careful with who they let replicate their logo (I hear lots of complaints about this), but they do themselves in with the merchandise they license that is predominantly on black or navy backgrounds and the horrible light yellow they use for the gold in material - I mean, are we pastel yellow or gold? While I understand why they do this (I don't want only white sweatshirts - or wanna be gold ones unless I'm going to the game itself), I think it creates a huge misunderstanding in the colors. And on top of that, we are the yellow jackets...not the gold jackets...so that makes it even more complicated.
Look at our uniforms when we wear the "gold" pants...they are yellow gold, but the helmets are metallic gold. And while fabric is tough in metallic form...it's not like metallic gold pants don't exist. (FSU, Notre Dame, etc.)
Here's a funny that might help you understand the gravity of the confusion. While I knew the fight song at age 3 (using "heck" of course) which clearly states white and gold, I thought Tech's colors nearly my whole life were black and gold. Even when I attended Tech in the early 90s - I never connected the dots that black was not one of the predominant colors. I had all kinds of stuff that said, "I bleed black and gold." Every article of GT clothing I had until the past few years was either black with a yellow logo or navy with a yellow logo. Buzz is yellow, not gold. And he's black, not navy. This complicates things a lot. Gold is VERY difficult, as the metallic doesn't translate on screen in RGB or in many print formats unless you use metallic ink, so all types of gold or yellow have been used and no one is quite sure what color Tech is unless they go look it up (and who does that except us nerds on this site?). And in fabric, it is even more difficult. Until I started working in marketing, I didn't really get how difficult gold was, and often used it interchangeably with a "goldish" yellow in my mind. Worse, my kids are 9 and 7, and they color everything yellow and black in support of GT...They think the colors are yellow and black, even though I've tried to explain they are is white and gold.
I think if our colors were red and black - or blue and red - or orange and white - it would be less complicated. Everyone knows "Tennessee orange" vs Clemson orange. Everyone knows Crimson Tide vs UGA red. Or ....you name it. As it is, we have a brand color pallet which includes gold, yellow, white, navy, black, dark yellow/gold, and light yellow/gold. There is no understanding of a "Tech gold"! And they are working on coming up with a new gold!!! Do you think Tennessee or Clemson would ever say, hey, we are working on a new orange??
And not to ramble on (pun intended) but most colleges have this identity crisis with their mascot - having 2 names (i.e. rambling wreck and yellow jackets, rebels and the landsharks, crimson tide and the elephant, war eagle and the tigers, on and on) but they seemed to have nailed the colors pretty well. I might be shot for saying this, I wonder if the problem is that Tech is such an engineering school that they don't know to care about things like this on the right level. Maybe for so long, marketing wasn't done by marketing professionals - maybe it was managed by engineers? There are colleges that have gold and have overcome...maybe we should take a page from their book.
