Saturate Hungry Shoppers with Vibrant Colors

When shoppers are anxious to use a purchase soon, they’ll consider items with saturated colors to be a better value for the money. The reason, according to studies at Boston College, is that vibrancy makes items look larger, which in turn is due to how saturated colors grab the brain’s attention. Another way of stating the effect is that if consumers place a higher value on an item being larger, they are willing to pay more for it when colors on the item are saturated.
     Although the experimental stimuli in this study were laptop computers and suitcases, I believe the relationship between saturated color and perception of larger size would also hold for packages in which items are contained. It did hold true for one example of a container: The researchers found that people placed more jelly beans in a cup when the cup had highly saturated colors. It seemed that the people perceived the cup as being larger than it otherwise would be. The effect also held for surroundings: The ceiling height of a room was estimated to be lower when an ottoman with high instead of low color saturation was the measurement standard.
     To use this finding as a marketer, recognize that a color’s saturation refers to a property other than its hue. Red is a different hue than green or blue. Saturation refers to the purity or the colorfulness of the hue. The attention-grabbing property of saturation may have evolutionary origins in that ripe fruits and venomous animals in nature tend to have more saturated colors than their surroundings.
     However, when the shopper intends the purchase for future rather than immediate use, avoid highly saturated colors. In these situations, the influence of shape is greater than the influence of color. Vibrant colors can interfere with the brain’s processing of shape, so it’s best to keep down the vibrancy.
     There are other ways to draw attention, and those also can give the perception of better value. At University of Southern California, shoppers presented with two unfamiliar products in a category—one of the products in an unusually-shaped container and the other one not—said, on average, that they’d get more for their money if they were to buy the product in the unusual container. The researchers concluded it’s because the unusual shape draws more attention, and the consumer’s brain subconsciously translates the extra attention into higher worth.

For your success: Retailer’s Edge: Boost Profits Using Shopper Psychology

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