A new marketing innovation: “loot quality tier” colors for all consumer products. Bring the ease-of-visual-parsing of the video game Diablo to product sales!

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Background:

In video games, a major user interface innovation was to color-code different item qualities (or “tiers”). This was popularized (and possibly invented) by the 1996 game Diablo, where boring non-magical items were gray, while enchanted objects were color-coded by quality “tier” (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Color-coding allows the user to easily determine the worth of various pieces of loot. Sometimes, value isn’t obvious at a glance: for example, is the “Shinbone of Striking” more magical than the “Cleaving Axe of the Wolf”? The tier coloration makes it obvious.

The Issue:

The difficulty of evaluating confusingly named objects is not limited to video games. Famously, Microsoft’s Xbox branding included the following four names (listed out-of-order):

  • “Xbox Series X”
  • “Xbox Series S”
  • “Xbox One”
  • “Xbox One S”

One of these is a premium “top tier” console, while another is a budget version of a previous-generation console. (Can you guess which is which?) Color-coding (or better naming) could have minimized customer confusion.

Proposal:

The proposal is simple: all consumer products in should be color-coded to indicate their “tier.” Let’s imagine a phone buyer trying to make sense of the (hypothetical) set of iPhone names in Figure 2:

Fig. 2: These are fake (but representative) iPhone model names. Which of these is a stripped-down budget version, and which is the ultra-premium flagship phone? Who knows!

If we color-code the phones in Figure 2, the confusion is gone!

Fig. 3: The phones are now marked with a “tier” color: Tier 1 (gray) is a low-end entry-level phone, Tier 2 (blue) is the base model, and Tier 3 (orange) is the premium version.

Cars could also benefit from this color-coding scheme, since manufacturers often sell several roughly-equivalent cars with varying levels of “luxury” (Figure 4).

Fig. 4: These are made-up car names, but the real situation is even more confusing due to trim levels (the incomprehensible “XL,” “XR,” “SR,” “PRO TOURING EDITION” suffixes). Even worse, high-end cars are often offered under a different brand (e.g. a luxury Honda is an “Acura,” and a luxury Toyota is a “Lexus”).

If we apply tier colors to the cars, it becomes immediately obvious which car is the entry-level one and which is the fancy luxury version:

Fig. 5: With these tier colors, we can intuitively set our expectations for each car (features, price, etc.) before diving into the details.

Conclusion:

If these tiers were actually used in a consistent manner within a product line, this could actually help consumers. This is probably most likely to occur when there is a natural ordering of quality, as with airline seats (economy → business → first class).

PROS: Would be very useful when comparing similar products at a glance.

CONS: Marketers would probably refuse to use the lower-end colors. Perhaps even the cheapest entry-level car would be colored red and labeled “LEGENDARY TOP-TIER CAR.”

Originally published 2026-03-02.