Researchers from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business have found that the color red increases both attention to detail and risk aversion.  Blue, however, produces a strong sense of openness to new things and enhances creative thinking.

These variances are caused by different unconscious motivations that red and blue activate, says [researcher Juliet] Zhu, noting that colour influences cognition and behavior through learned associations.

“Thanks to stop signs, emergency vehicles and teachers’ red pens, we associate red with danger, mistakes and caution,” says Zhu, whose previous research has looked at the impact of ceiling height on consumer choices. “The avoidance motivation, or heightened state, that red activates makes us vigilant and thus helps us perform tasks where careful attention is required to produce a right or wrong answer.”

Conversely, blue encourages us to think outside the box and be creative, says Zhu, noting that the majority of participants believed incorrectly that blue would enhance their performance on all cognitive tasks.

“Through associations with the sky, the ocean and water, most people associate blue with openness, peace and tranquility,” says Zhu, who conducted the research with UBC PhD candidate Ravi Mehta. “The benign cues make people feel safe about being creative and exploratory. Not surprisingly it is people’s favourite colour.”

In a study of more than 600 people, the two researchers tracked performance over a range of tasks that included solving anagrams, designing toys, and assessing marketing.  Not Exactly Rocket Science has a nice summary of one experiment in which subjects were asked to judge two versions of an ad for a digital camera, one providing specific and detailed information and the other showing generic travel images (things like maps).   When the ads appeared against a red background, subjects were more receptive to the detailed version; when they appeared against a blue background, subjects were drawn to the visual, if more generic, version.

These findings also reveal another interesting implication for integrating color with messaging and packaging:

[P]eople were more receptive to a new, fictional brand of toothpaste that focused on negative messages such as “cavity prevention” when the background colour was red, whereas people were more receptive to aspirational messages such as “tooth whitening” when the background colour was rendered in blue.

The release on Science Daily  is here.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 7:36 am and is filed under Marketing, Research.