The Psychology of Color in Marketing and Branding

Ah, one of my favorite topics.

The article correctly points out how there are no simple rules of thumb on this. The human visual system is very much driven by context and contrast, which makes it basically impossible to validate statements such as "red just works better than green".

That _does not mean_ that there's no system, though.

There is growing evidence that fast ("System 1") human decision-making tends to favour salient (i.e. visual pop-out) choices over less salient ones - for example, a recent PNAS study [1] found that the pop-out effect of a food item has a sizeable influence on it being picked up when consumers are in a hurry - going as far as even overriding prior brand preferences.

Disclosure: the software to quantify pop-out used in the study was build by my company (http://eyequant.com)

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/110/40/E3858.full.pdf

It's all about linking those outside inputs to one's brain. A simple question: what comes to your mind when you hear the name of your favourite fruit? There are some nice books with different theories, but, to get it, I found this is a good starting question to explore and understand what brand is after working and learning in branding and marketing for a while.

Marketing with colors outside of the Estados Unitos will also have it's own perils. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture

Interesting. So it's not that yellow and red actually make people hungry, as the legend goes, but rather those colors are seen as more appropriate for restaurants. Makes sense.