The Brain Sell by David Lewis

Author:David Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Engineering emotions through color

As we saw when considering the retailing environment, color plays an enormously important role in generating emotions, acting directly on the emotional regions of the brain in profound ways. Red, for example, increases physical arousal, which is one reason it is so often used as a warning.

Color can even affect the way in which experienced referees judge the outcome of matches. Sports psychologists at the University of Münster, Germany, showed 42 referees video clips of martial arts bouts in which one combatant was wearing red and the other blue. They then replayed the clips after digitally manipulating the clothing so that the colors were swapped around. In close matches this resulted in the scores being exchanged, with competitors now dressed in red being awarded an average of 13 more points than when they had been dressed in blue.31

We used this finding in a study comparing three sets of advertisements for take-away meals. These were identical except in one respect, the color scheme. In the first the predominant color was red, in the second blue, and in the third green. Brain activity showed that the most emotional engagement occurred with the red scheme, followed by blue and then green.

Another example is Cadbury’s brand identification with the colour purple. Bailey Dougherty, Account Director at Boom! Marketing, a leading Canadian experiential marketing agency, believes that the net worth of the color to Cadbury’s is “almost priceless,” since

it is associated with a series of feel good emotions. Cadbury Purple is regal yet accessible—and you may have noticed, that seeing the colour does make you think of chocolate.32

If brands, or cued representations of brands such as Cadbury purple, are embedded in an entertaining context, they can be influential without being consciously recognized or recalled. Cues that predict rewards are potent hidden persuaders that result in impulsive eating.

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