Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [65]
Perhaps for this same reason, the color pink, with its associations of luxury, sensuality, and femininity, is used to sell everything from sleepwear, underwear, perfume and soaps, to drugstore remedies (got an upset stomach? Pepto-Bismol will neutralize and soothe your indigestion) to toys to computers. That’s right, thanks to the unexpected success of a pink laptop manufactured by the Hong Kong company VTech, marketers from Toys “R” Us to the NFL, the NHL and NASCAR are starting to roll out pink versions of their best-selling toys and sports clothing.
Color gets our buying juices going in other ways, too. When Heinz rolled out its EZ Squirt Blastin’ Green ketchup in 2001, customers bought more than 10 million bottles of the stuff in its first seven months on the market, the highest sales spike in the brand’s history—all because of a simple color change. And when Apple announced “It doesn’t have to be beige” in the weeks before they rolled out their candy-colored iMacs (the iMacs and their distinctively childlike colors were in fact literally inspired by candy; Steve Jobs later stated half-jokingly that he wanted people to “lick them”), people started preordering them like crazy. In a study of phone directory advertising, researchers found that colored ads hold customers’ attention for two seconds or more, whereas black-and-white images hold our interest for less than one second—a crucial difference in the retail world, when you consider the fact that on average, most products have only one-twentieth of a second to grab our attention before we move on.
A study carried out by the Seoul International Color Expo found that color goes so far as to increase brand recognition by up to 80 percent. When asked to approximate the importance of color when buying products, 84.7 percent of total respondents claimed that color amounted to more than half the criterion they consider when they’re choosing a brand. Other studies have shown that when people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within ninety seconds, between 62 and 90 percent of that assessment is based on color alone.
A decade ago, when I was working for BBDO, I developed a “choose a new color” ad campaign for M&Ms in Europe. Back then, blue, pink, and white M&Ms didn’t exist, so we asked consumers, via the Web, which color they would most like to have melt in their mouths (not in their hands). In the end they picked blue, and sure enough when Mars rolled out the new color, sales rose.7 Another time, Mercedes-Benz asked my team to create a new Web site for their fleet of high-end automobiles. So we created a riotously colorful Web site that consumers seemed to love (though the company hated it enough to discontinue it).
Even though sight is not as powerful in getting us to buy as we once believed, much of what we perceive every day is connected to our eyesight. Still, most of the time, we’re barely aware of it. Consider a fascinating study by a major French food manufacturer testing two different prototype containers for a diet mayonnaise product aimed at female shoppers. Both containers held the exact same mayo and bore the exact same label. The only difference: the shapes of the bottles. The first was narrow around the middle, and thicker at the top and on the bottom. The second had a slender neck that tapered down into a bulbous bottom, like a genie bottle. When asked which product they preferred, every single subject—all diet-conscious females—selected the first bottle without even having tasted the stuff. Why? The researchers concluded that the subjects were associating the shape of the bottle with an image of their own bodies. And what woman wants to resemble an overstuffed Buddha, particularly after she’s just spread diet mayonnaise on her turkey and alfalfa sandwich?
AS FOR SOUND? Well, believe it or not, sound branding has been around since the 1950s. General Electric, for example, created its familiar three-chime sound—the auditory equivalent of a logo—decades ago. Kellogg’s,