What colour research says about brand personality

Colour advice for online stores tends to promise sales. The published research we could verify is mostly about something smaller: what people associate with a colour. That is still useful, if you keep it to its size.

Colour and the personality of a brand

Lauren Labrecque and George Milne published four studies in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (“Exciting red and competent blue”). According to the abstract:

• Study 1 maps hues onto brand personality dimensions.
• Study 2 looks at how saturation and value (lightness) strengthen those traits.
• Study 3 shows how marketers can use colour to change brand personality and purchase intent.
• Study 4 finds that colour affects how likable and familiar a brand seems.

We read the abstract, not the full paper, so we do not quote its sample sizes or effect sizes. Purchase intent is normally a stated intention in a survey, which is not the same as a recorded purchase.

Colour and emotion across countries

Jonauskaite, Abu-Akel, Dael and colleagues asked 4,598 people in 30 nations, speaking 22 languages, to link 20 emotion concepts with 12 colour terms (Psychological Science). They found a high degree of shared pairings across nations, with an average similarity of r = .88. They also found that a person’s nation predicted their associations beyond that shared pattern, and that nations closer in language or geography were more alike.

For a store, the plain reading is that colour-emotion links are partly shared and partly local. If you sell into several countries, one reading of your colours may not hold in all of them. That is our inference, not a finding of the paper. We read the abstract, not the full text.

The field is young

Andrew Elliot’s review of the field (Frontiers in Psychology) is cautious. He writes that theory in this area “remains at a nascent level of development” and that it is “premature to offer any bold theoretical statements.” He lists problems that weaken many studies: most work looks only at hue, colour is often controlled on the device rather than measured, viewing conditions are rarely controlled, and small samples “commonly produce overestimated effect size estimates.” He adds that all colour effects depend on conditions such as culture, gender, age and task.

What this means for a store

• Colour can plausibly help signal tone: calm, energetic, serious, playful. The evidence is about perception, not about sales.
• No source above reports a store’s conversion rate or revenue as an outcome of picking a colour.
• Expect local differences. Check your palette with people from each market you sell into.

What to do this week

1. Write down three words you want shoppers to feel on your store. Compare them with your main brand colour. Note its hue, how saturated it is and how light it is.
2. Ask five customers, ideally from different countries if you sell abroad, which three words they would pick for the store. Do it by email or a short form. Compare their words with yours.
3. If the words clash, change the colour in the theme editor on a duplicate theme, and measure it as a test, not a certainty. Our note on A/B testing explains why most tests show nothing.
4. Whatever colour you pick, check text contrast against the WCAG numbers (see “Contrast is a number”).