How does color affect consumer response?
Abstract
What is going through a customer’s mind when he or she is standing in a supermarket aisle looking at several shelves full of the same product? Are there specific factors that lead consumers to choose a certain brand of product over the other? If there are specific factors, what are they, and how do they influence consumer decisions?
Research shows that one factor is color. Color is ubiquitous in a retail environment. Whether planned or not, each product’s packaging features a primary color. This color, which can be “owned” by the brand, becomes its identifier among a sea of other products in the world of retail packaging. With this information in mind, I set out to research why color is so important when marketing and packaging a product. I wanted to better understand, “How does color affect consumer response?”
The goal of my research is to identify the effects that color has on consumers. In a review of literature, I will first evaluate the importance of color in product marketing and packaging. Next, I will discuss the effects color psychology, meaning and symbolism has on consumers, and where they learn their color preferences. Lastly, I will discuss several examples of how researchers and marketers have studied and used color to influence consumers’ actions.
In order to put this new knowledge to work, field research was conducted to learn what brand colors are currently used by leading brands in the United States. I wanted to see if trends would emerge, or if certain colors were favored across different categories. I also wanted to see if there was a correlation between the brand color of a product and what should be its appropriate color based on psychology and symbolism. I chose several different categories of consumer packaged products and listed the top five brands by annual
sales volume. I then went to retail stores and studied the packaging, recording their primary and secondary, and tertiary brand colors. I did the same study for a list of newly emerging, successful products to see if these products began a new color trend, or continued with the previous trends.
After gathering the brand color data, I conducted research that focused on one product category that my students use in a large class project: coffee. I wanted to give my students experience researching consumer responses to color in packaging and branding. So, I used them as the research subjects and studied how different colored coffee packaging effected their response to the product’s brand image. I presented the coffee research results to my students and encouraged them to use the data when they designed their own coffee brand identities in class.
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