Color Appetites with Fitting Hues

Would lime juice and cucumber-flavored potato chips be liked better by your shoppers if the items came in green instead of red packaging? Yes, say consumer psychologists at China’s Tsinghua University. Unless those shoppers are seeking innovative products, in which case they’ll probably prefer the red packages for lime and cucumber flavors and green packages over red for a strawberry juice and for tomato-flavored potato chips.
     Color exerts a strong influence on perceived taste. Researchers at University of British Columbia and University of Florida found that consumers say an orange juice tastes sweeter when the juice is a brighter orange. This held although the extra hue was due to taste-free food coloring. Juice color had more influence on taste reports than did information given about expert quality ratings or item price.
     Consistency across sensory attributes generally enhances item appeal. Incongruous sensations jar shoppers. Marketing professionals at University of Oregon and York University found that ratings for a bag of coffee beans were lower when the bag looked like burlap but felt smooth like paper than when the surface both looked and felt like burlap.
     The argument for consistency goes beyond attributes of appearance, on the one hand, and flavor or texture on the other. Effects of different sensory modalities are quite interdependent. “Synesthesia” refers to the cross-sensory phenomenon where certain sounds produce in the shopper’s brain perceptions of colors, each sound bringing forth a particular hue. Or how the sounds of music can arouse sensations of taste. The quality of background music in a restaurant influences gustatory experiences when eating and thereby the image the diner carries away as the restaurant image. Specifically, research from Oxford University finds:

• Sweet tastes and sour tastes are accentuated by higher-pitched music 
• Bitter, smoky, and woody tastes come through better with lower-pitched music 
• Piano or woodwind strengthens fruity flavors 

     But for shoppers in a playful mood, those with innovative personalities, or those seeking to improve their creativity, incongruity in sensory experiences attracts positive attention to an item. When Apple released the first iPhones, the case looked like plastic, but felt like metal because of the aluminum bands. This contrasted with the cases from Samsung and Nokia at the time, phone cases which both looked and felt like plastic. Those marketing professionals at University of Oregon and York University report that the surprise offered by the iPhone plastic look and metal feel operated to Apple’s advantage.

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Construct Shopper Certainty Using Consistency
Coordinate Store Atmosphere Stimuli
Use Synesthesia to Reinforce Store Image
Play Full with the Sales Potential of “Playful”
Show Shoppers Selective Transparency