The Effect of Colour on Consumer Purchase Behaviour

We live in a world of product overproduction. Companies manufacture products that they cannot sell and this causes environmental problems, wastes energy and water, and reduces the efficiency of the companies. It is known that the colour of products and their packaging can affect consumer response. Inappropriate select of colours by manufacturers and retailers is thought to be a major contributing factor in product overproduction. Colour theory and human response to colour has great potential to help to understand the role of colour in product packaging. However, it is not clear whether colour perception and preference have been effectively utilised in design. A limited understanding of colour strategy in product-colour design calls attention to the need for studies about colour information (individual colour preference and colour association, in this research). The aim of this research is to investigate the effect of colour on consumer purchase behaviour (specifically product packaging colour) and the role that this may play in product colour design. A potential impact of this research is that products will be designed in colours that lead to less overproduction. The research adopts a framework (with three studies and a meta-analysis, six research activities and three research methods) to understand the relationship between consumers’ product-colour purchase intentions, their colour preferences and their response to colours. The main finding is that consumer individual colour preferences influence consumer product-purchase intentions but are more likely to do so in the absence of primary colour factors such as colour functionality, colour performance and colour associations. This framework potentially allows a prediction about which product categories individual colour preferences are most important for. The framework also supports the idea that consumers might make different product-colour decisions when they are in different decision conditions. Specifically, the work explores the effect of the amount of time available for a purchase decision and finds some evidence that individual colour preferences may be more likely to influence consumers’ product-colour purchase intentions in a short-time decision-making condition and vice versa.