Jack Blog
August 11th, 2015 By Jack Morton
The Story
It’s pretty crazy to think about how much external factors can influence our mood and behavior. Color, for instance, has the power to calm us after a fight or cheer us up after receiving sad news. Feeling angry? Maybe switch your screensaver to Pepto-Bismol pink for a while (scientists painted the jail cells of particularly aggressive inmates this color in the 1980’s, with amazing results).
Feel the rainbow
The School of Life, an organization dedicated to helping people develop emotional intelligence, recently developed a set of colored pencils that can help you get in touch with the psychology of color, and realize the powerful influence individual colors have over you. Each pencil in the set includes a corresponding mental state etched on the side: hope (yellow), vitality (orange), adventure (light red), power (dark red), ambiguity (lavender), clarity (light blue), discipline (dark blue), sanity (green), realism (dark green), mellowness (brown), dignity (dark brown), and authority (black). So if you can’t figure out what it is about that commercial or billboard that gets you so riled up or mellows you out, subject it to a little bit of color analysis…you might be surprised!
Why it matters
Since color has the power to influence our perception, it has an enormously important role in the world of marketing. In one study, researchers found that up to 90% of snap judgments that consumers make about certain products can be grounded solely on color. Talk about a cognitive goldmine…
On a similar note, make sure you check out the presentation on the science of sensory branding that our Senior Associate Strategist, Lewis Robbins, gave at the Cannes Lions Festival earlier this year.