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.
