4 - ARMO GLOBAL

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Using colour to your advantage!
John Steele, ICO Europe
How can the correct colour
choice help sell my products
or make my customers’ products
sell better? What influences people’s
decision on colour?
At ICO we make a lot coloured powders,
last year in Europe alone we supplied in
the region of 35000 tonnes.
We decided to investigate by looking
at some applications and talking
to a specialist in colour
psychology!
Introducing the Psychology of colour
When we choose to use colour we will get a complex
“reaction” to that colour from everyone who sees it. Often
in industry (rather than in the mass consumer market for
example) we might think that perhaps the attractiveness
and colour of our products is of lesser importance. Colour
psychology is a specialty of Angela Wright. Here is an
excerpt from fascinating work taken from her website
www.colour-affects.co.uk by way of illustration:
“The key factor that Angela Wright recognised in studying
colour psychology was that, equally, there are no wrong
colours; It is the combination of colours that triggers the
response; you could have a grey sky on a summer day,
but our reaction to that grey with the beautiful colours
of the summer landscape would be different from the
combination of a grey sky with a predominantly snow
white scene. We do not respond to just one colour, but to
colours in combination. Even the winter landscape contains
many colours
Case study: mail order CD project.
“Our clients had already begun promotion of a new opera
CD when Colour Affects first met them; their in-house
designers had chosen the colours for the promotional leaflet.
The client asked us to adjust the colours of the leaflet, in line
with the principles of colour harmony/colour psychology
contained in the Colour Affects System. We were not asked
to create a palette from scratch. The client printed 50% of
the leaflets in the original colours and 50% in the colours of
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the adjusted palette; in every other respect, the two leaflets
were identical. The two mail outs were as similar as possible.
The promotional leaflets in the new colours produced sales
of over 500,000 more CDs than the leaflets in the original
colours specified by the in-house design team.”
Angela gives some more examples on her website of how
colour is energy and the fact that it has a physical effect on
us has been proved time and again in experiments - most
notably when blind people were asked to identify colours
with their fingertips and were all able to do so easily.
The shorter the wavelength, the stronger the underlying
physical effect.
She relates that colour is Nature’s own powerful signalling
system - the universal, non-verbal language. Scientifically, it is
the first thing we register when we are assessing anything: a