The Marketing Rainbow

There are several different areas of a marketing campaign that must be decided before such a campaign can be launched. When a company’s top marketing officers are brainstorming the promotion of a new product, several questions come to mind: What’s a good slogan? What’s a good name? Perhaps the company will try to get a celebrity to endorse it. Maybe the company will sponsor an event such as a sports game or a concert to reach out to consumers.

For a lot of marketers, it will be quite some time after all this is decided that they will start to consider other questions: What color will the product’s logo be? What color will the packaging be? What color should the wall’s stores distributing said product be? What colors will we use in the fonts and backgrounds in our ads? These questions of color can sometimes be the difference between billions in sales, and closing up shop after a few months. It is important for advertisers and marketing specialists to understand how people react to colors, how people feel about colors, and what colors are best to be used in promoting certain products and services. Mimi Cooper reports that color is among the three most important factors in deciding on a purchase. Researching the psychology of colors can have immense benefits.

Despite the amount and quality of research that has been done on the psychology of colors, there have been very mixed results. This has been the case for several reasons. One reason why findings on color psychology have varied so much is the simple fact that people are different. All the studies will admit exceptions and confirm that individuals have different feelings toward color. Thus, any research on this area of psychology is somewhat flawed. Another reason why it has been difficult to unify research in color psychology is because there is a significant difference in how people of different nations and especially different cultures react to certain colors. A third justification for the lack of uniformity in studies on color psychology is that different experimenters ask different questions. There seems to be a fundamental divide separating those who want to assess the pleasantness and likeability of certain colors, and those who want to discover what feelings, images, or meanings certain colors elicit in people.

Likewise, the jury is still out on whether response to color is an inborn attribute or it is learned through experience . Finally, a change in color psychology research over time has been the more recent evaluation of the effects of color being broken down my researchers into three categories: hue, chroma, and value . Hue refers to what we generally know as the difference between red or blue or yellow. Chroma deals with the richness and saturation of the color. Colors with high chroma have a larger proportion of the hue in them. Value refers to the lightness or darkness of a color relative to a neutral black-grey-white scale. A dark color has low value. This complexity in the evaluation of color has fundamentally changed how recent studies have been constructed.

That having been said, there are several trends that researches have found to be fairly stable in the realm of colors and their psychological effects on humans. Some trends have to do with divisions in the population. For example, children have been observed to differ from adults in their psychological reactions to certain color; men differ from women; and, as mentioned before, there are several cultural distinctions. As a whole though, certain responses to particular colors and types of colors have been documented. For instance, Kaya and Epps explain, in the College Student Journal, that red is exciting, orange causes distress, purple represents dignity, yellow is cheerful, and blue is comforting . More generally, people prefer warm colors (red, yellow) to cooler colors (blue, green), and lighter colors over darker colors. More specifically, a mix of yellow and red symbolizes autumn and makes reminds people of Halloween.

Certain participants in studies have noted that blue represents the ocean and the sky, and that red can symbolize either love and romance, or evil and blood. Some of the associations being made about colors are part of human physical nature. Kaszubowski notes that yellow is a good attention getter because our brains process it the fastest. Colors can even affect our blood pressure. Research has shown that both blood pressure and respiratory rate increase with exposure to red light and decrease with exposure to blue light. Thus, colors can have both physiological and psychological effects on us.

As more of these trends become evident, the researchers are finding out the psychological trends change across nations and cultures. In America white is the color wedding dresses and purity, where it is the color of mourning in China and Japan. Additionally, while green is known as the color of envy in America, yellow symbolizes greed in countries such as Japan, Italy, and Turkey.

The people of some countries do not respond well when their national color is used for marketing. Thus, green does not work as a commercial color in Egypt. While orange is a sacred color in Hindus and Buddhist monks, Zambians do not even consider it its own color. Commercially, half of the U.S. associates soft drinks with the color red, while Korea and Japan see the major soft drink color as yellow. Many world cultures are so different that the experiences of certain people are different enough to elicit very different feelings toward certain colors.

Marketers and advertising agencies have to take all these facts about colors into account when they design promotion campaigns. Color is involved in marketing far beyond simply making flashy ads grab consumers’ attention. Researchers suggest that color can be used to aid in quest for awareness, differentiation, satisfaction, brand recognition, and loyalty . Color must be considered when designing a logo packaging , interior decorating of stores and restaurants , and advertisements.

Bottomley and Doyle constructed a study that tested how certain colors worked as logos for certain products. They asked subjects to categorize a select list of products as either functional, “products that fulfill a need for problem solving or problem prevention,” and sensory-social, “products that fulfill a need for personal expression, convey status, attain social approval…or sensory pleasure, variety, or stimulation.” The study showed evidence that some colors, such as gray and black, were more suited to represent functional products such as anti-freeze and power tools; other colors, like yellow and pink, were more suited to represent sensory-social products such as chocolates and ice cream.

From the start of the marketing process, designing a logo, color plays a very influential role. One of the biggest problems that marketers face is applying their color schemes across cultures. Researchers say that the main pitfall for companies is lack of proper cross-cultural research in an effort to cut costs. Marketers must put in the time to fully understand color’s role in promoting products.

With the logo set, marketers must decide on a way to package their product, if it is a tangible item and not a service or a place, such as a restaurant. Kaszubowski  suggests that a company should determine the message it wants its product to send. The packaging should create a message and image in the minds of consumers, associated with their product and brand, that keeps them loyal to the company.

Kaszubowski also describes research that has been done in the area of food packaging. He notes a study that presented subjects with the same package of flour with twenty-five different package designs. The study discovered that a green bag was associated with good taste and an orange bag was perceived to be rich in vitamins. Everything about the packages was the same except for color, and yet the bags of flour sent different messages. Kaszubowski also mentions how the implications of the color black have changed recently.

What used to be a color of death and depression has come to signify elegance and wealth. To this effect, he notes that the packaging of Mike’s Hard Lemonade uses yellow and black to symbolize lemon flavor and sophistication, respectively. This is evidence of another trend in food packaging: coloring the package based on product flavor. The package of orange flavored products, such as oranges, orange juice, or orange flavored candy, will most likely be colored orange. Lastly, Flynn and Warden confirmed that the color of a package could even influence its perceived weight.

Whether discussing the store in which a product will be sold, or deciding how to decorate the interior of a restaurant, atmosphere color is very important. According to Belizzi and Hite, Kotler defined the term atmospherics, which is “an effort to design buying environments to produce certain emotional effects in the consumer to enhance purchase probability. This is a very important concept for marketers to understand, because research proves that the decorating of stores and restaurants can really affect consumer decision-making.

Certain colors can be used to stimulate or suppress appetite. Red  and yellow are both appetite stimulants. This is why fast food restaurants, most notable McDonald’s, use these colors to insure that patrons eat more and leave quicker. Singh also notes restaurants that might want to use blue inside their establishments to relax their customers. Classier restaurants, which want to create a more leisurely elegant atmosphere, will use this blue color tactic. On the flipside, all-you-can-eat restaurants will often decorate their establishments with blue to suppress appetites simply so they can save money.

Once the marketing department of a company has designed a logo, packaged their product, and set it up for distribution, it’s time to advertise. Leichtling quotes Bob Watson, VP of marketing and media at the NNN, saying, “color has enough stopping power to give a weak advertisement legs.” An important concept about color psychology to keep in mind during this phase of the marketing campaign is that how people will respond to colors is often based on their preferences and past experiences . When deciding what colors to use in advertisements, a marketing team must know its demographic. Leichtling  recalls an automobile company’s advertisement that showed an elderly woman getting out of a teal colored car. This particular ad was unsuccessful because teal, and other exotic colors relate more to the youth culture. It is important to match the colors of your product its ads to the section of the market you are trying to reach.

After reviewing a good portion of the literature that has been written on the psychology color, it is clear that this knowledge is very useful to the field of marketing. Ninety percent of the information we take in through our senses is visual, and children base their food preferences more on color than taste. It is crucial that marketers and advertisers realize the influence color has on a product or service’s appeal. Scientists and other researches have proven that specific colors, certain types of colors, and particular combinations of colors, generate very different responses. Therefore, in logo design, product packaging, interior decorating, and advertising, choice of color is pivotal in the marketing of any item.