Can Colour Influence Buying Decisions

It’s pretty undeniable that colour plays a significant role in your business, even if you didn’t realise it. Whether you are redesigning your logo or website or re-vamping your store or office, it is important to know the conscious and unconscious power that colour has in purchasing decisions. As a human, we see around 10 million different colours, yet these can be categorised into what we simply know as blue, green, and red, for instance. Colours have the power to create emotional reactions - some are pleasant, others are not so. Studies have shown that 84.7% of people say that colour is a primary reason they purchase a product, whilst 52% of people will not return to a store if they did not like the aesthetics. In this way, you want to be using colours which are aesthetically pleasing in order to increase your conversions.

Gender Differences

Studies have shown that women prefer softer colours, whilst men prefer bright colours. This is why tampon branding tends to use a lot of pale pinks and baby blues, whilst branding for video games is often bright red and electric blue.

Brand Recognition

Kissmetrics have that colour increases brand recognition by 80%. As we know, brand recognition has a direct link to consumer confidence. Large brands can even be associated directly with colours, for instance, the colour red is associated with energy and can be linked directly to Coca-Cola. Similarly, purple is used to soothe and calm and can be linked to Cadburys. Further, blue creates the sensation of trust and security and has links with Facebook.

Colour And The Consumer

It has even been shown by Kissmetrics that colour can attract specific types of shoppers, and even has the power to influence shopping behaviour. For instance, red creates a sense of urgency and therefore attracts impulse shoppers. Red can often be seen in clearance sales and fast food outlets. On the other hand, navy blue, a colour which creates the sensation of security, attracts shoppers who are on a budget and can often be seen in big department stores and banks. Pink and baby blue colours are often used in clothing stores as they attract more traditional buyers.

What colours is your brand based around? Of course, colour is not the be-all-and-end-all of making a sale, but it does have a lot more influence and create a lot more connotations than you may have originally thought. 

Written by

Total Merchandise | Editoral Team

Our editorial team is drawn from a pool of experienced promotional merchandise product team members, account managers, marketers and other contributors. With such a wide range of skills and experience, they write about many aspects of promotional merchandise, wider marketing and business matters, as well as company news updates.

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