The Clear New Choice of Consumers? : Products: Colorless merchandise--colas, detergents, you name it--is becoming a phenomenon. Advertising experts call it just that.

It’s a clear thing.

And it’s on your supermarket shelves: clear colas, clear deodorants, clear detergents.

They’re beckoning you with a promise that they taste better, clean better, make you look better and are environmentally benign to boot.

Or are clear products really the white chocolate of the ‘90s, a study in cognitive dissonance--all being pushed as the good guys when, in fact, they’re the same product in see-through clothing?

Ultimately, the clear movement is a marketing thing. You’re not supposed to think about it, just consume.

“It’s the convergence of the Perrier phenomenon with the green consciousness and the health consciousness left over from the ‘80s,” says Bob Garfield, who reviews ad campaigns for the trade magazine Advertising Age.

“Once it began to dawn on marketers that people would pay a premium to have water shipped by freighters from Europe, then they began to think that the public is stupid enough to mistake clarity with healthfulness.”

“It’s an attempt to tie into the environmental movement, and a lame attempt at that,” adds Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y. “I mean, turpentine is clear. Clear doesn’t mean better, and that’s what it’s being pawned off as.”

The marketing of clear products marks the meeting of a number of factors, none of which is more important than what Garfield calls “the constant striving of consumer products people to throw mud up against the wall and see what sticks.”

Doug Hall of Richard Saunders International, a Cincinnati-based firm that tests consumer acceptance of new products, says the clear phenomenon goes straight for the senses.

“When we introduce a new product and say it’s different, and we can see and feel the difference,” he says, “that’s sensory support, and that works. When Pepsi says it’s a different taste, I believe you. Clear isn’t necessarily a matter of absence of, it’s giving a benefit--better skin, new taste. People want the clear to support a benefit.”

So in pushing their clear goodies, ad people have crafted an appeal to environmental consciousness that is also a way to go after a hipper, younger demographic with a “now” product. Along the way, they’re sending a message that the ‘80s--the Age of Excess--are finally over.

“What applies to almost all the clear products is the idea that clear is more honest and more ‘90s,” says Leslie Savan, who writes about advertising for the Village Voice. “The ‘80s (were) about glitter and content and things, whereas now we’re supposed to be seeing things as they really are, and this is supposed to be a poetic product analogy for that.”

In other words, transparency is supposed to represent purity. But transparent can be defined two ways: as “capable of transmitting light so that objects or images can be seen as if there were no intervening material” or as “easily understood or detected; flimsy or obvious: transparent lies.”

So the question is: Are clear products really benign or the supermarket version of the emperor’s new clothes?

Take, for example, the plastic packaging of a lot of these clear products.

They may be recyclable (meaning you can reuse them), but they aren’t biodegradable (they won’t decompose into natural elements). Once they’re dumped into a landfill, they will have the same environmental effect as their colorful counterparts--those plastic bottles will sit there until the dinosaurs return.

And how about the clear ingredients?

For the most part, they’re no different from anything else on the shelves: Some have very few chemicals, some have a lot. A product like Ban for Men Clear Deodorant contains about as many ingredients as unclear Ban, like propylene glycol, steareth-100, sodium stearate, isosteareth-2, triethanolamine, triclosan, and FD&C; Blue 1.

This trip through the periodic table also brings up the question of how clear products achieve their transparent state.

Once again, the answer is all over the map. Some, like Crystal Pepsi, simply remove certain key ingredients with color found in Pepsi. Others, notably detergents and cosmetics, substitute some chemicals for others. In the case of clear beer--Coors is testing a clear malt beverage called Zima--it involves an extraction process. You dump charcoal powder into a tank of beer, then filter out the powder, which tends to remove the beer’s color.

But clear is not just a chemical thing. It’s a marketing phenomenon that has as much to do with shelf space in your local store as anything else.

Colas, for example, which once dominated the $50-billion soft drink market, have seen their share dwindle to a little more than half of total sales. Threatened by quasi-natural upstarts like Snapple and Sundance, cola giants Pepsi and Coke have gone back into the research lab and come up with their “New Age” alternatives. Enter Crystal Pepsi and Coke’s Nordic Mist.

“It’s also another way of extending your product line in a very cost-effective manner,” Celente says. “You have the same product and are putting less ingredients in it and calling it something else.”

Not that this search for clarity is really anything new. Clear sodas like Sprite and 7-Up have been around for years. Remember the “Uncola” campaign?

And there are all those beer commercials, for everything from Coors to Rolling Rock, touting their origins in clear mountain spring waters.

“Over the years we have come to associate that as fresh and clean, especially moving water, where it’s rushing and bubbling, not stagnant,” Savan says. “I think the whole rise of bottled water that proceeded this had a lot to do with (the clear phenomenon).”

But is the world embracing clear?

According to Hall, it is.

“The (products) where they are providing clear as a sensory support for benefit are doing very well. Most have proven themselves in test markets for six to 12 months before going national. They are not overnight fads.”

The latest product to take advantage of the clear phenomenon? Beer. In addition to Coors’ Zima, Miller has told its distributors it will be shipping a clear suds to test markets later this month, and both Stroh and Anheuser-Busch are reportedly studying the idea. (Not to be outdone, Gallo Winery is testing a transparent brandy.)

Clear beer may sound like heresy to hardened suds maniacs, but Hall begs to differ.

He claims the clear thing is part of a bigger trend that also encompasses blue products (like blue corn chips) and what he calls “ugly products like 7-grain bread. In the ‘90s we’re saying, ‘I don’t know if I can believe everybody. I’ve been sold a bill of goods in the ‘80s. I want to see it with my own eyes.’ ”

What’s Red-Hot? Green, of Course No matter what its origins or meanings, the clear product craze is also an indication of the role color plays in the packaging and marketing of consumer products.

“It’s extremely important, probably at the top of the list,” says Patricia Verlodt, a Chicago-based color consultant specializing in consumer products. “When products are equal in value and quality, color is the No. 1 reason why a person would pick one over the other.”

Verlodt points out that colors can impart distinct messages and feelings. Red, yellow and orange, for example, are favorites with the fast-food industry because they are “quick colors, hot and warm, that make you want to hurry.”

Black, once thought of as generic and boring, is now considered sophisticated. Once the fashion industry began pushing the little black dress, the color became, in Verlodt’s words, “kickier, rather than somberer.”

But guess what color is hotter than hot these days? Green.

“It’s been a long time since green has been hot,” says Verlodt. “And this is a darker green, much more grassy, very much connected to this whole environmental, ecological greening of the world. It’s been hot for at least three years, and I see it hot for another two, which is a long time for a color.”