The Influence of Colour on Consumer Brand Personality-A Generalized Study in Indian Context

Siddharth Batra

From  beverages  to  consumer  electronics,  marketers  are  using  colour  in  innovative ways. As  a  marketing  tool,  colour  attracts  consumers  and  can  shape  their  perceptions. Through  colour,  a  brand  can  establish  an  effective  visual  identity,  form  strong relationships  with  a  target  market,  and  position  itself  among  competitors  in  the marketplace, as the classic case of Coca-Cola versus Pepsi  illustrates.

To distinguish itself from its main competitor, Pepsi moved away from red and embraced the colour blue, spending millions of dollars on marketing initiatives, such as painting a Concorde jet in its signature blue colour (Cooper 1996).
Colour sells products. It is a powerful marketing tool that  significantly influences consumer purchases, so much so that it  accounts for 85% of the reason why someone decides to  purchase a product (Hemphill  275).
Marketers must understand the psychology of colour in order to  use it effectively. Nearly all products sold today have colourful  facades.  Selecting the right colours to use has an enormous  impact on product sales. While no single set of rules governs  colour choices, research has established general guidelines  based on the principle of associative learning, the relationship  between colour and emotion.

The  study  was  mainly  conducted  to  understand   how  colour  affects  consumer perceptions and to provide a framework and  empirical evidence that draws on research in aesthetics, colour  psychology and associative learning to map hues onto brand  personality dimensions. In order to demonstrate how colour  influences consumer brand perceptions through referential  meaning, we map findings from previous work on colour associations to items in the brand personality scale and develop hypotheses for the four dimensions. The study focussed upon nine independent colour variables (white, yellow, pink, red, orange, black, purple, brown, green) and their influence on the four brand personality dimensions i.e. dependent variables (sincerity, excitement, sophistication, ruggedness) .
The study was carried out on 100 Indian respondents, with final   sample size of 88, who were selected using non-probability  convenient sampling.          

A self-designed standardized  questionnaire was the main instrument of data collection. The  data  were  collected  using  the  research  instrument  and  were  presented on  the  basis  of  demographics  like  age, gender, religion, education  and occupation etc. It also covers interpretation of descriptive  statistics followed by hypothesis testing for 88 cases measuring  the influence of different colours or hues on different brand  personality dimensions viz. sincerity, excitement, sophistication  and ruggedness. The results of the data analysis provided strong support for the relationship between colour and brand personality.