Tag Archives: color

Cases

3D food printers change brand image

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I followed map in Prague, Czech Republic. I crossed a bridge (Legions’ Bridge), climbed up a tower (Petrin Tower), and drank beer at a local brewery (Strahov Monastery Brewery). However, I went to one place most tourists are not interested in. I visited a design exhibition held at a convention center (Výstaviště Praha Holešovice).

 

 

Professional designers opened their booths and invited visitors in the convention center. I listened to presentations, tested products, talked to designers, and bought a few items.

 

 

At one corner, I met 3D printers printing out chocolates. Although media says 3D food printers will change what we eat and I myself play with a 3D printer, this was the first time to see that food was actually printed out.

 

 

 

 

Afterwards, I became curious about this product and googled “Love Magenta.” I expected to find a person who loves the purplish red color and sell 3D food printers. Surprisingly, Love Magenta is the online store of the Deutsche Telekom. The website of “Love Magenta” says:

 

Magenta – so much more than just Deutsche Telekom’s corporate color, the most important element of our corporate identity.

But Magenta means even more to us: It represents our attitude towards life. Our employees show their pride in our brand with our everyday products. We showcase our favorite color perfectly in our online shop: sometimes bold, sometimes understated – but always stylish and up to date.

The shop offers a constantly changing range of high-quality products, including fashion, accessories, and gadgets. What these items have in common is the color Magenta, of course – and the love and attention dedicated to each detail. All products are designed and produced exclusively for our shop. This ensures the highest possible quality, and gives our designers complete freedom to create truly unique items. It’s never been easier for our employees and customers to express their love for Magenta in so much style.

Take a look – we’re sure you’ll find something you like.

 

Color is an effective marketing tool and some colors are stylish. Silver Bang & Olufsen speakers and white Balmuda toasters are eye catching. However, most success cases come from product manufacturers. How can service companies link themselves with stylish colors when they have no tangible, visible products? Deutsche Telekom gave an answer; Really New Products (RNPs) such as 3D food printers help service companies link their colors and styles. In the near future, other Really New Products such as wearable devices, voice recognition devices, or drones will be effective marketing tools for service companies to promote their own colors in stylish ways.

 

 

Cases

Please help us recycle easily

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We want to voluntarily participate in recycling but do so only when it is easy. Here are the two bin boxes available at a university in Seoul. Unfortunately, their colors and their names are not matched: the left one has a blue cover and its green panel says “recycled” whereas the right one has a green cover and a blue panel says “disposable.” The mismatch among name, cover color, and panel color led me to give up choosing one for my empty coffee can. Instead, I threw it away somewhere else. Indeed, behaving in a sustainable way requires huge mental resources. Therefore, things need to be designed carefully in advance.

DML_Bin box_01

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Reference

White, K., Hardisty, D. J., & Habib, R. (2019). The elusive green consumer. Harvard Business Review, 11(1), 124-133.

People say they want sustainable products, but they don’t tend to buy them. Here’s how to change that.

Cases

Blue iced tea is popular

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Color determines food judgment. According to Hoegg and Alba (2007), for instance, the brightness of an orange juice affects people’s taste discrimination more strongly than its brand name (e.g., Tropicana or Winn-Dixie) or its price information. Food judgment is probably influenced by the hue and saturation of the food as well.

Recently, I find some stores selling blue-colored iced tea. This unexpected color may attract significant attention among those who do not drink teas or who is visually attentive such as kids. However, most adults around me infer it as a poor-quality fake beverage because, they believe, tea is supposed to be orange rust or brown regardless of its temperature. This suggests that changing the color of a given product enables designers and marketers to pursue a new market by sacrificing their traditional market.

Surprisingly, there exists a green wine called Vinho Verde in the world! 🙂

20130731_Ice tea @ Seoul

Hoegg, JoAndrea and Joseph W. Alba (2007), “Taste Perception: More than Meets the Tongue,” Journal of Consumer Research, 33 (4), 490–98.

Perceptual discrimination is fundamental to rational choice in many product categories yet rarely examined in consumer research. The present research investigates discrimination as it pertains to consumers’ ability to identify differences—or the lack thereof—among gustatory stimuli. Three experiments reveal systematic bias resulting from the presence of common visual and verbal product cues. Particularly noteworthy is the finding that the amount of bias induced by a subtle, nonevaluative cue can far exceed the bias induced by overt and well‐established evaluative cues. In addition, the effects these cues have on perceptual discrimination diverge from the effects they have on preference.

Cases

What happens when the men’s room sign is pink?

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20130315_Washroom @ Ewha Women University (2)

Blue is for boys and pink is for girls. This color-gender association is strongly established in many countries. In a women’s university in Korea, however, signs for men’s rooms and for ladies’ rooms are both colored in pink. My friend said that they use the same color to avoid any possible gender discrimination. Interestingly however, pink signs confuse men when searching for men’s room. Indeed, “men” needs to be written down on the door of men’s room.

20130315_Washroom @ Ewha Women University (3)

This raises a series of interesting questions.

  • First, does the different colors discriminate different genders?
  • Second, if this is the case, should we sacrifice our color-based convenience in order to promote social justice?
  • Third, if color-based convenience needs to be replaced with other coding systems, what are the other ways that do not discriminate gender? For instance, if the shape-gender association is a good candidate (below), how could we UN-learn the color-gender association and then learn the shape-gender association?
20130315_Washroom @ Ewha Women University (1)

Reference

Scarpina, F., & Tagini, S. (2017). The stroop color and word test. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 557.

The literature on interference in the Stroop Color and Word Test, covering over 50 yrs and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set of 18 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories, relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading, are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention.