The Impacts Of Colour Preferences On Consumer Purchase Decision

This project is about why people choose to buy products in one colour rather than another.In particular,it is concerned with whether a person's individual colour preference(that is,which colour – in an abstract sense – they prefer over others)could influence the colour that they would choose for a product purchase if they are given a choice.In this study two psychophysical studies have been carried out;one was carried out on-line over the internet and the other was carried out in the laboratory.In both studies,participants were presented with products(54 in total)in a range of different colours and asked to indicate which colour product they would prefer to buy.After this,participants were asked about their personal preferred colour.A strong relationship between personal preferred colour and product-colour choice was found;participants tended to choose products in a colour that was the same as their personal preferred colour.This agrees with some recently published literature(Westland & Shin,2015).However,it was found that the strength of the relationship varied across different product categories.Where there were rational reasons for choosing one colour over another(for example,the colour may indicate something about the performance of the product or the colour may be related to the function of the product – this can be referred to as a colour-performance or colour-function factor)then a participant's individual colour preference had relatively little impact on their product-colour choice.On the other hand,in the absence of these colour-performance or colour-function factors,participants were very likely to choose a product in a colour that corresponds to their personal colour preference.This led to the development of a framework for understanding the relationship between individual colour preferences and product-choice colours.This framework will be further developed and tested in future work.The study also confirmed findings from the literature that people generally prefer cool colours to warm colours but that there were some gender and culture differences(females and Chinese participants prefer slightly warmer hues to male and UK participants).There is also some interesting findings on the relative merits of lab-based and web-based experiments that might have exciting implications for the gamification of this research in the future.