About this interesting, unfamiliar combination’s role in pricing, branding and marketing a product.
WHY TALK ABOUT THIS?
There are so many things that we hardly imagine of being intermingled, and one of those is the role of colors and how that determines the pricing of a product. This combination can obviously not be talked about without referring to human psychology and behavioral economics which tells us about how consumer’s reaction changes with color. Have you ever imagined, why can’t we wear excessively tacky colors like neons in our daily life?That’s because we prefer more basic and subtle colors in daily wear. But, in contrast to this, when neon shades were trending some time ago, the price of every neon apparel had skyrocketed. This is all about our perception of colors and how we relate to them. Honestly, not much information is available on this; apart from some interesting pieces, majority of them were solely psychology focused. So let’s dive in and look into this unique role!
Fun fact: I tried very hard to find why our currency notes have some specific color, but seems like, the government just printed it for the sake of distinguishability! (no fun)
In our day to day life, colors play a huge role in the kind of products we choose to purchase. The combination of colors used in stores reflects the quality parameter and causes the consumer to expect higher prices. While taking the logo decisions of a brand, the company keeps various attributes of colors in mind for targeting the right audience or the right product. For example, while targeting different age groups, a product made for the middle and old ages people might use subtle and lighter tones; while a product targeting the young generation or what we call the millennials may use darker tones or more vibrant tones.
Every color has its own meaning and value attributed to it. Starting off with yellow; it is seen as very optimistic and warm tone giving trust signals (this totally doesn’t mean that other brands are not trustworthy) as you can see in the figure besides. Orange on the other hand gives a very cheerful, inviting and ‘out of the box’ appeal which can be seen in the Nickelodeon or Mozilla Firefox’s logo. Although, orange plays a very different role in purchasing behavior which we’ll see later. Red plays a role of full energy along with an alarming one, so as you can see, it gets you pumping. A great example of this would be Coca Cola’s logo. Purple steps aside from the ordinary daily routine along with it’s sign of wisdom. Whereas, blue is seen as very royal, expensive and calming; green indicates serenity and growth. The classic monochrome where black gives the edgy, over the top look and white is basic for peace apart from being the combination of all colors. Now you can easily guess why a pair of denims of brands like Levis or Gap are so expensive
HOW COLORS MAKE YOU PAY?
There have been loads of experiments conducted to observe the impact of colors on pricing mechanism. In a research conducted by Pownell and Graddy (2016) to study the impact of color in the art auctions, it was found that artists usually get paid extra when they use more shades of blue in their paintings which as said earlier give the essence of royalty and are more pleasing to the eyes. Now let’s talk about the basic concept supporting the result of research. We all are familiar with the concept of pixels, which we fix while uploading an image in a social media platform. So greater the quantity of pixels, greater is the quality. Each pixel is a combination of RGB i.e. red, green and blue color; the lower the RGB, darker is the shade and higher RGB indicates lighter shade. These colors are take up the value between 0 and 255. The result was as follows: there was a negative relationship seen between the RGB value and the price of the painting ceteris paribus (keeping other things constant) and a 1 unit decrease in RGB led to 0.3–0.4% increase in price.
Another study by Pownell et al. (2016) compared the effects of red and blue color on consumer behavior and saw that blue color caused a higher likeliness that the product will be purchased and red color was highly related to delays in purchases and rather not purchasing it. This happened because of the perceptions of the respective colors as being positive (blue) and negative (red).
It was seen by Babin et al. (2003) that the use of orange colors in stores is believed to be related to discounts or off prices, and consumers expect the products to be fairly prices. Whereas, low prices in blue interiors caused the consumers to shop more often and generated an excitement within them. Therefore, blue was considered as a safe option for interiors to cause more purchases among consumers. It was also seen in another experiment that men prefer dark and bold tones i.e. shades with black mixed and women were more open to shades with a mix of white color.
Let me sum it up in the form of an example. All of us have some basic images in mind related to specific colors. If you are asked to decide the name of a product that is a lipstick shade of pink, then you might go about guessing something related to rose or blush. On the other hand, if the lipstick color is brown then you can relate it to mocha, chocolate, cocoa and similar words. Even considering the price charts of stocks, there are buy and sell signals which are denoted with green and red thus indicating a symbol of growth and optimism (green) as discussed above and as usual red related to loss making and alarming situations. Although sellers don’t necessarily make a loss, its all a part of trading which is another tandem altogether. These are the ways in which the colors impact our daily lifestyle and our spending habits.
If anyone of you wants to study this analysis in greater depth, then the research articles will be given below in references! I hope this intrigued you a bit :)
REFERENCES:
Crowley, Ayn E. “The two-dimensional impact of color on shopping.” Marketing letters 4.1 (1993): 59–69.
Babin, Barry J., David M. Hardesty, and Tracy A. Suter. “Color and shopping intentions: The intervening effect of price fairness and perceived affect.” Journal of business research 56.7 (2003): 541–551.
Pownall, Rachel AJ, and Kathryn Graddy. “Pricing color intensity and lightness in contemporary art auctions.” Research in Economics 70.3 (2016): 412–420.
Bellizzi, Joseph A., and Robert E. Hite. “Environmental color, consumer feelings, and purchase likelihood.” Psychology & marketing 9.5 (1992): 347–363.
Comments
Post a Comment