Ethanol: How to Make a Warning Label Not Look Like a Warning Label
Growth Energy, the pro-ethanol lobby group, is totally cool with the EPA's plan to put warning labels on pumps that dispense higher percentages of the homegrown fuel additive, including the recently approved 15 percent blend for newer vehicles. It just wants to make sure that they don't look much like warning labels.
More specifically, the group wants to tweak the EPA's proposed design in order to swap out the blaze orange and exclamation points with calming periwinkle blue and sotto voce periods. Growth Energy filed formal comments, some 19-pages worth, with the EPA outlining its support for the federal agency's new labeling rules aimed at keeping motorists with cars made before 2007 from unwittingly filling up with E15 gasoline.
Growth Energy's label idea swaps out the word "CAUTION!" and replaces it with the more soothing "ATTENTION." The Growth Energy version also removes this key phrase "This fuel might damage other vehicles."
Growth Energy's reasoning behind the kinder, gentler label:
This design provides all information necessary for consumers to make an informed fuel choice and does not inappropriately impact marketplace perceptions of the fuel.Growth Energy is really into labels, apparently believing that this is the key to winning over consumers and changing their pumping habits. This is the same group that launched the Label My Fuel initiative to require a national standard of country of original labeling for fuel. Basically, a "born in" label for fuel, which is way more complicated than one might expect.
Here's the problem with their design, and the EPA's, I might add. Consumers are generally horrible at noticing labels or signage of any kind whether it's orange, red or in little blinky lights. Making it even more subtle handicaps the consumer, and that's not good for anyone, ethanol industry included.
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