The Crafty Arts of Chromatic Selling & Subliminal Messaging

Now look, I’m not really going to shatter anyone’s world if I write down in black and white the truism that corporate bigwigs are trying to make us buy things, am I?

Perhaps the only standout thing about this comment is that it is in monochrome. Stark. These are the colours (or if you’re pedantic, the shades) of serious writing. They are the colours of facts being driven home, of administrative documents and investment reports. Even banks statements these days come gussied up with cutely coloured borders and select words highlighted in reliable blue or prosperous plum.

We see a multitude of cavalcading colour everywhere, and nobody knows how to use it better than marketing gurus. Colour, although it is by nature egalitarian and belongs to all of us, is nonetheless a companion tool of consumerism.

Let me explain…

You see: colour has connotations. They can be remarkably wide-ranging. Emerald for verdant lawns and rolling Irish hills, but also for the green-eyed-monster. Green for icky-sicky medicine, for safe-to-GO! signals, and for money-greed (or, if you want the more diplomatic term, affluence). It’s for ecology and luck and education.

Or take red. The romantic red of Valentine’s, the misty red of anger, the whole tangled orchestra of red from action, warmth, love, danger, to speed, passion, strength, power. In food, it’s been shown we associate red with sugar, and that association is strong enough to make us think salty popcorn is sweet if eaten out of a red bowl.

Black is mysterious, malicious, elegant, and evil. Purple is imperial, luxurious; yet spiritual, and creative. Brown is wholesome and also disgusting. Blue is professional yet also melancholy. You get the idea.

Symbols and colours are considered particularly potent in advertising because human brains can process their meaning much quicker than we process the meaning of words.

By harnessing these associations, companies can use colour and graphic design as a ‘language’ to ‘communicate’ to the buyer, and ultimately guide behaviour. A simple example is McDonalds, who uses red to signify ‘fast’, and yellow for ‘cheerful’. Symbols and colours are considered particularly potent in advertising because human brains can process their meaning much quicker than we process the meaning of words. They speak to us instantaneously, on an emotional level, and so embed themselves deeper into our psyche.

Although the over-sensationalised concept of subliminal messaging has been largely debunked, I would argue that it does exist, but through colour. Colours are used so cleverly, and the public are so unaware of their effects, that their connotations do slip under our conscious radars. Subliminal messaging, by the way, is illegal. But where other examples of it (like flashing a slogan so fast it can’t be read, though the brain supposedly absorbs it) are completely underhand, colour can be used boldly in the open.

Big business isn’t the only proponent of these techniques. In Tokyo, the government flooded railway platforms with soothing blue lighting, and reported that suicides fell by 74% at the stations in question. Equally, Baker-Miller pink is the shade of vivid rose that was used in jails, after a researcher found it was the optimum pigment not just to calm prisoners, but to reduce violent behaviour, and even diminish muscle strength and relax the cardiovascular system. ‘It’s a tranquillising colour that saps your energy,’ he insisted. To this day, there are Baker-Miller pink jail cells across the USA and in Switzerland.

The colour blue has been shown to trigger sleepiness, and it is no coincidence that the anti-anxiety and sleeping pill Diazepam (first marketed as Valium) is blue.

Numerous cases have been made to suggest that we interpret chromatic subtexts according to our culture, upbringing, and environment. For example, if my mum’s living room was mauve, I might associate it with safety. Whereas if you were brought up in a country where mauve was used as a hurricane warning, you’d associate it with danger. And though this makes broad logical sense – most things are affected to some extent by nurture – it doesn’t explain the universal physiological changes we seem to experience when under the influence of colour, that go even beyond colour psychology.

For example, red has been shown to speed up our heart rate. Brands lean on these types of responses to make their products feel more effective. The colour blue has been shown to trigger sleepiness, and it is no coincidence that the anti-anxiety and sleeping pill Diazepam (first marketed as Valium) is blue. The most potent erectile dysfunction tablet currently on the market, Cialis, is yellow, the invigorating, stimulating hue.

But as much as this makes out colours are a mighty, magical force capable of being used for and against us, it is of course not that simple. When it comes to marketing, our responses are largely rooted in biological programming and what we expect from the natural world. Red is a popular shade for food brands because of the ripeness of bright juicy fruits and berries, and freshly cut, raw crimson meat. Red makes sense. A study from 2006 found that brand identity and colours are judged by their perceived appropriateness to that particular product. If you’re in doubt about what this means, just picture purple packaging for a salad, or a brown tampon label. See? Inappropriate, and thus, off-putting. 

Of course, there are companies which have done so well in reinforcing their identity in our minds that we no longer associate their brand colour with the natural world. When we see a certain, curious shade of light blue, few will think of a robin’s egg, or even lapis lazuli (which inspired the founder’s choice of it), for this is now Tiffany blue. No doubt for a certain kind of Audrey Hepburn-esque lady, this tint triggers all the racing-heart, sweaty-palm symptoms of arousal.

Try as I might, I haven’t been able to find a reason our body reacts a certain way to certain colours. Why should white make us feel serene, and not orange? But this, apparently, is just how things are, in the same vein as water is wet. What is clear is that these reactions have a huge effect on our decision-making. 85% of consumers cite colour as the primary reason for choosing their products, and additionally, up to 90% of impulse decisions are based solely on the item’s colour. It’s equally important in the digital realm, where 52% of the time, poor colour choice can send users off a website, never to return.

To add even more confusion, we all see colour slightly differently, depending on what we’ve been taught, and the way light is being reflected.

There are other ways savvy salesmen might be able to correlate a specific shade in your mind with a specific product. In an exhaustive analysis of ancient texts from across the world – including Chinese, Icelandic, Vedic, and Hebrew – it was found not one contained a mention of the colour blue. They all had far fewer words for colours in general, and instead categorised by shades. So, the sky was ‘light black’, and the sea was ‘dark green’. As a result, there’s been a lot written on whether we need to ‘know’ a colour, or have a word for it, to be able to see it. Experiments with the Himba tribes of South West Africa, who have no word for blue, showed they were not able to pick out the colour blue amid green. However, when shown different shades of green, they could distinguish them better than Westerners.

To add even more confusion, we all see colour slightly differently, depending on what we’ve been taught, and the way light is being reflected. In any case, if having a name for it helps our perception of a colour, then there’s another good advertising ploy: give it a name. We can see this in action with popular hues like millennial pink, which is just baby girl pink for a different generation. It made us notice it though. Similarly, the rich-goldy shade that hit fashionable society as mustard yellow is just a rebranded ochre, the colour of deserts and clay. It’s the oldest pigment in the world. As soon as something becomes lime green or forest green, we start to recognise it.

Our brains and our bodies respond to colour, and we might as well listen to its secret language and use it to make ourselves feel good. That is perhaps the only sure takeaway from the chromatic universe: we should pay attention to it, and never be blind to colour.