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By Root 318 0

the tinier and lighter our digital camera or tape recorder is, the more intricate and cutting-edge the technology inside it must be. Often that’s true, up to a point. Certain companies, however, would argue that the heavier a product, the better its quality. A Bang & Olufsen remote control, for example, would weigh perhaps half of what it does if it wasn’t stuffed with a completely useless wad of aluminum to make customers believe they’re holding something substantial, sturdy, and worthy of the high price. Once, to prove a point, I conducted a test. I gave one hundred consumers two Bang & Olufsen remote controls, one with aluminum inside, the other without it. The immediate reaction from the consumers to the lighter-weight remote? “It’s broken.” All because of the lack of weight. Even when they found out the lightweight one was completely functional, they still felt its quality was inferior. Or what about Duracell’s intriguing idea to design batteries shaped like bullets (the product unfortunately never hit the shelves). Research showed that when men who replaced the normal batteries in their flashlights with the heavy bullet-shaped ones (a process which felt not unlike loading a gun) were asked whether they thought the new batteries were more powerful than traditional ones, every single man answered yes—despite the fact that the bullet design actually substantially weakened the power of the battery. My point? Whether you prefer your gadgets stuffed with metal, light as air, or heavy as ammo, the feel of a product plays an important role in whether we decide to buy it.

A FEW YEARS back, I traveled to Saudi Arabia on an assignment to brand eggs. Yes, you read that right—eggs. After touching down in Jeddah, a car picked me up and drove into the middle of the 125-degree Fahrenheit Saudi Arabian desert. Two and a half hours later, I found myself standing inside one of the largest egg farms in the world.

My hosts had ferried me out into the desert to advise them on how to create eggs that would most appeal to the visual senses. It would seem a slightly bizarre request, until you realize how many varieties of eggs there are in the world and how much the appearance of eggs has to do with which type we select. For a long time, white eggs were popular among consumers, who associated them with cleanliness, good hygiene, and high standards. Then, gradually—no one knows why exactly—the public had a change of heart. Suddenly white was out, brown was in. It seemed consumers perceived brown eggs as more organic, more natural. But that still left manufacturers with the problem of what to do about the insides of eggs.

A general rule of thumb of the egg industry is that the more yellow a yolk appears, the more it will appeal to consumers. It’s instinctual—probably an evolutionary adaptation that kept our ancestors from eating bad eggs. At any rate, when you add coloring to chicken food, color migrates into the cells of the egg yolk, so egg farmers can enhance the hue of their egg yolks by adding coloring to the grain. My job was to help this company create the perfect yellow. For ethical reasons, I couldn’t support the idea of adding artificial coloring to the grain, so instead, I identified a vitamin mixture that could be added to the hens’ feed that would produce yolks from light yellow to middling-yellow to the passionate yellow, plus all the variations in between.

So the next time you sit down for breakfast in your local diner, and the waiter sets two fried eggs with gorgeously yellow yolks in front of you, well, I plead guilty.

My point is, colors can be very powerful in connecting us emotionally to a brand. A few years ago, I conducted another little test. I invited six hundred women into a room, and presented each of them with a blue Tiffany’s box. There was nothing inside, I have to admit, but they didn’t know that. When the women received the box, we measured their heart rate and blood pressure. And guess what? Their heart rates went up 20 percent, like that. The women never saw the logo, just the color—with its powerful associations