Illustrative Examples

Colour is powerful because it can change our mood – the mood of potential customers. If a website improves our state of mind, our relationship with a brand will deepen and the probability of a return will increase. Advertisers and designers are well aware of that. We are not guided entirely by logic when making purchases. We tend to be driven by less identifiable factors such as emotions. Successful brands like Rolex don’t sell watches, they sell a lifestyle. 

In 2011 there was a fair trade act dispute between Cadbury Schweppes and Nestle over the use of purple in an advertising campaign by Nestle (Clark 2011). This case is used to show how a brand can become associated with a colour and how that colour can elicit a response within the consumer. In this case the purple becomes comforting to the consumer and there is a sense of reliability when purchases continue. The use and association with the colour purple helps retain business and helps consumers associate those warm comforting feelings of eating chocolate with a colour.

 

The colour red is associated with passionate human emotions. Businesses use the colour red to influence perception. What we see commonly is the colour red used in the advertising of fast food, the colour red is attention grabbing which aids in brand awareness, and then naturally humans have the most significant emotional response to the colour red, creating excitement more easily in the human brain. The link here is obvious then, use the colour red to grab attention and subconsciously prepare the human brain to be more reactive. For example, imagine you’re hungry, walking down the street and you see a red sign and yellow sign for McDonalds, this is not only going to attract your attention, its going to draw you inside. These points are interpretation however, they are backed up by scientific studies; psychologists Andrew J. Elliot and Daniela Niesta Kayser, both then at the University of Rochester, found that male experimental participants perceived women as more attractive and sexually desirable when wearing red.

References:

Elliot, Niesta. (2008) Romantic Red: Red Enhances Men’s Attraction to Women. Journal Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 95, No. 5, pages 1150–1164;

Clark. (2011). Cadbury wins the right to the colour purple. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cadbury-wins-right-to-the-colour-purple-6262717.html