제 15 호 The Effects of Color Marketing
Kicker : LIFE
The Effects of Color Marketing
By Yun-Seo Jung, Cub-Reporter
What color comes to mind first when you think of Starbucks? Probably, most people will think of 'green' first. Like this, when you think of a company, the phenomenon that reminds the company's representative color is related to ‘Color Marketing.’ Color marketing refers to a marketing technique that stimulates consumer's desire to purchase in a broad sense.
Let's learn more about color marketing through the feelings and meanings of some colors. First, red is strong, passionate, and stimulates appetite. In addition, the attention is high enough to attract attention. It is widely used in food industries such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's in that red is high in attention and stimulates appetite. For example, Coca-Cola uses red to show a strong image of pungent carbonated drinks. Frank Robinson, who liked the combination of white and red in sharp contrast, created a Coca-Cola slogan that read ‘Coca-Cola Delicious and Refreshing’ in red letters on a white background. This slogan was the beginning of making red, a symbol of Coca-Cola.
Blue traditionally shows images of success, trust, stability, hope, peace, happiness, and youth. It can be seen that blue is widely used in fields that require a professional image that it has an image of stability and trust. For example, Woori Bank uses blue to show an honest image. Searching for Woori Bank's vision and core values, there are ‘customer happiness,’ ‘future challenge,’ ‘honesty trust,’ and ‘talent first,’ which can be seen to contain messages of happiness, trust, stability, and success. On the other hand, blue is not often used in food brands because it decreases appetite, and there is one representative foodserviceindustry that uses blue as a brand color exceptionally. It is POCARI SWEAT. The foodservice industry does not use blue color for package design because it originally gives an image of decreasing appetite. In this way, blue has negative images such as decreased appetite as gustatory sensations, on the other hand, it has positive images such as refreshing and moisture supplement as visual sensations. Paradoxically, Pocari Sweat strongly emphasized the refreshing aspect, and it had a decisive influence on the blue color being settled as a representative image color for sports drinks these days.
Lastly, green has images such as peace, neutrality, and relaxation, and it is the color that gives the most comfort to human eyes. This color is used by companies such as Starbucks and Naver that have images of stability and comfort. In the case of Starbucks, in 1987, CEO Howard Schultz chose the logo in green to show the marketing theme of 'Relax and Peace of a Cup of Coffee in the Forest of a Gray Building.’
Success and Failure Cases in Color Marketing
While some enterprises have succeeded in marketing by using the proper color for each company, and have attracted consumers' attention, others have failed in marketing. Representatively, Heinz and Coca-Cola have failed in color marketing. Coca-Cola may be considered a successful color marketing company because it left a strong impression on consumers by setting its brand color to red, but it was pressed with this red color. In 2011, Coca-Cola in the U.S. launched a white can in time for Christmas. The pre-launch plan was a limited sale for three months, but it failed to proceed in about a month. Most of consumers said that the taste seemed to have changed even though the color of cans had only changed, and many responded that it was confused with Diet Coke. The marketing that Coca-Cola put down the red color remained a failure of color marketing due to the cold consumer response. Next is Heinz's green ketchup. Heinz, a leading ketchup company, developed a special product in the past to break the stereotype that existing tomato ketchup is red. It was a green ketchup. Green is a color that symbolizes peace and relaxation, but this marketing had a negative impression on people because it had an effect of reducing appetite and remained a representative case of color marketing failure.
According to the Korea Color Research Institute, humans use 70 percent of their vision, 20 percent of their hearing, and 10 percent of their sense of smell and touch when they perceive objects. Color accounts for more than 50% of vision, so color is a really big part of recognizing something. In the end, color affects consumers' product choices and further represents the identity of a company as a brand color. Furthermore, brand color has a lot of influence on success and failure because it can immediately show the company's identity to consumers in terms of visuals. Isn't it interesting that the brand color of companies that we usually pass by had a big impact on the rise and fall of enterprises? Therefore, color marketing is simple and has great power.
Sources:
https://www.topdaily.kr/articles/90832
https://www.topdaily.kr/articles/88437
https://www.coca-cola.co.kr/stories/since-1886/coca-cola-red-secret-formula
