Below is a shared viewpoint stimulated from a piece by an industry contributor. Here, content writer and project manager, Bobbi Parke, discusses the article, “The Psychology of Color in Marketing and Branding” by Gregory Ciotti, Marketing Strategist and Contributor at Entrepreneur.com http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233843
As a project manager, I am on a constant quest to increase my knowledge as to what makes for the most successful websites. I’ve been on a color exploration for quite some time now.
I found this article and others like it to be quite interesting because in my experience so few people take into consideration the intangible. The intangible includes just about anything we cannot see and is oftentimes unquantifiable.
As I research the importance of color – specifically in regards to website design – I find this to be the case with the study of color, too. There exist many contradictory findings and theories within the color studies that have been done. There simply is not enough information gleaned from studies to back up one theory over another. But, that is no reason to discount the importance of color psychology.
What is color psychology? It is the science of how color affects behavior. There is enough information to tell us that color is critical. It is incumbent upon leaders in any field to pay attention and learn how color psychology plays into purchases.
This article is chocked full of studies, many with opposing findings. I find I have walked away with more questions than the answers I sought.
Mr. Ciotti points out, “…the truth of the matter is that color is too dependent on personal experiences to be universally translated to specific feelings.”
That said, Satyendra Singh, from the University of Winnipeg, reported in her peer review paper entitled Impact of Color on Marketing, “It takes a mere 90 seconds for a customer to form an opinion about a product. And, 62-90% of that interaction is determined by the color of the product alone.” So, apparently, color does need to fit into your brand.
Another study cited points out that “predicting consumer reaction to color appropriateness in relation to the product” is more important than the actual color itself. There seems to be a real connection between the use of colors and customers’ perceptions of a brand’s personality.
As a result of Mr. Ciotti’s research, he sums up, “Be sure to recognize that colors only come into play when they can be used to match a brand’s desired personality (i.e., the use of white to communicate Apple’s love of clean, simple design). Without this context, choosing one color over another doesn’t make much sense, and there is very little evidence to support that ‘orange’ will universally make people purchase a product more often than ‘silver’.”
But, though Mr. Ciotti asserts that no one color can increase conversions, he cites various studies that indicate that color and patterns do affect conversions, causing jumps and slumps. These, too, are worth reading.