Tag Archives: branding

world’s first coloured bubbles

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An inventor – Tim Kehoe – spent 15 years and £2,000,000 developing the world’s first non-staining bubbles – he calls them zubbles!! See http://www.zubbles.com/

zubbles

The bubbles contain a special dye that fades within 15 minutes of the bubble bursting. This is a clever use of a property of dyes – fading – that is usually thought of as a bad property and which scientists strive hard to eliminate. The special dyes developed for this product fade when exposed to air, light or pressure.

This reminds me somewhat of the breakfast cereal – cocopops – where the brown colorant in the cereal leaks out into the milk turning it a muddy brown colour. Not a nice thing – you might think. However, Kelloggs turned this into a marketing success with the phrase – “So chocolately it even turns the milk brown”. I’ve always thought this was very very clever. Very clever.

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Colour names affect consumer buying

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Have you ever wondered why, when you look at a rainbow, you see distinct bands of colour? You may see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (though more likely you will not be able to distinguish between indigo and violet). We know that the wavelength of light in the visible spectrum – http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/colour-101/ – varies smoothly and continuously, so why don’t we see a smooth and continuous colour spectrum? Why do we see distinct colour bands?

myspectrum

In my opinion the reason we see bands is because of something called categorical perception. We tend to want to group things that we perceive together into one class or another. But this grouping is not just a matter of putting things into boxes; it has an impact on how we perceive those things. We see categorical perception everywhere – indeed, I have often wondered whether even the periodic table of chemical elements is a true and accurate representation of how the world is or whether it stems from our categorical perception.

A recent study by Skorinko at the University of Virginia and colleagues at Rice University (published in Psychology and Marketing, 2006) finds that consumers have a more positive reaction to products whose colours are given rather exotic and flashy names such as mocha compared with the same products that are given plainer and genric names such as brown.

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 And how is that linked to the early statements I hear you ask (even though you asked very quietly)? Well, the authors hypothesise that the reason for the improved consumer reaction to the fancy colours is …. categorical percetption. The fancy names stimulate a more positive category than their plainer alternatives. It is also suggested that more ambiguous descriptions (mocha as opposed to brown, for example) yield higher consumer acceptance and safisfaction. I cannot resist finishing this blog with the last line from the paper by Skorinko et al. (2006) who write:

Indeed, the judgement of “that we call a rose” seems to be influenced by its name (Shakespeare, 1595). 

colour and brand loyalty

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I’m on the way to a dental conference in Houston to speak about tooth whitening. So with a few hours to kill in Philadelphia airport I am taking the time to read Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology – http://www.amazon.com/Buyology-Truth-Lies-About-Why/dp/0385523882

buyology

He describes an experiment that he conducted where he invited 600 women into a room and presented each of them with a blue Tiffany’s box. Their heart rates were being measured and they went up by 20% when they received the box. The interesting thing is, the women never even saw the logo. Just seeing the colour – and the presumed association of that blue colour with the Tiffany brand – was sufficient to excite them. Indeed, the book describes a study by Seoul International Color Expo that showed that colour increases brand recognition by upto 80%. Interesting ….