Why is Facebook’s main color blue? The reason, according to The New Yorker, is simply that Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, and blue is his most readable color.
Doesn’t sound very scientific, does it? That may not be the case, but here are some startling examples of how color actually affects our buying decisions. After all, sight is one of our most powerful senses. Data show that 90 percent of the way people perceive a product is based on its color.
So how does color affect us, and what is the scientific explanation behind color marketing? When we were trying to increase the sales of items in Buffer, it was important to investigate this question. Let’s take a closer look at some of the latest and most interesting research.
First of all: Can you identify online brands by color alone?
Before we go any further, here are some pretty amazing experiments that show just how powerful color can be. Try it. Can you guess which company corresponds to which button just by the color of the buttons? (Answer see ∨ at the end)
Case 1:
Example 2:
Example 3:
Example 4:
These examples come from YouTube designer Marc Hereon, and I think they highlight the power of color more than any other study.
What sensations does each color trigger?
It’s not always obvious to be fully aware of what emotions each color triggers in us. Logo Company has come up with a classification scheme that reveals which color is best for which Company and why. Here are four great examples:
Black:
Green:
Blue:
Obviously, every company is looking for the right color to convey a particular psychological emotion to its users:
Color can play an important role when we feel compelled to buy something. Here’s a great infographic from KISSmetrics, a data analytics firm, on the impact of color on our buying behavior.
As can be seen, green conveys the most relaxed state to users, making it easier for them to handle the purchase process. In fact, we didn’t intentionally choose green as the dominant color in Buffer — even though it works fine.
Also, from the picture above, I realized why black is often used on luxury goods.
How to better use color to enhance your brand identity?
This may be an interesting question, but we have to ask what practical decisions can we apply to our website or application?
If you’re building an app aimed at women, KISSmetrics suggests using blues, purples and greens that women prefer, and avoiding oranges, browns and grays.
If your app is primarily aimed at men, the choice of colors is a little different, as men prefer blue, green and black to brown, orange and purple.
In another experiment, Performable (Now HubSpot) wanted to explore whether simply changing the color of the button could lead to a different conversion rate.
They started by trying to guess what would happen if the green and red buttons were used.
They think green usually means ideas like “nature” and “environment,” and it’s widely used in traffic lights to indicate progress. Red, on the other hand, often represents excitement, passion, blood and warning. It’s also used in traffic lights, but it means stop. Red is also generally considered to be eye-catching and to be dazzling.
So they guessed that using A/B tests between green and red, green – the friendlier colour – would perform better. At least that’s their guess. Here’s what the interface looked like in their experiment:
So what was the result of this experiment? The fact was surprising: the red button had a 21% higher conversion rate than the green button.
As you can see, everything else on the interface is the same except for the color difference, which means that just the color difference of the buttons can make such a difference.
This result was quite surprising to me: if we read all the previous studies and asked every researcher to guess which button was better, I’m pretty sure almost everyone would say the green one.
At my company, we also did a series of experiments to try to improve conversion rates by changing colors. While the results are not entirely clear-cut, we do see a huge difference in color.
Although there are many relevant studies, it is difficult to draw general conclusions. For you, however, try to make a hypothesis for any change, and then experiment to see if it fits your hypothesis. Personally, I prefer to organize my opinions based on previous studies. But anyway, the data is more important.
One final fact: Why do hyperlinks use blue?
It’s something that really interests me, and there’s actually an interesting story behind it. In short, blue provided the highest contrast among the colors used on early websites.
Here’s the full explanation: “Tim Berners-Lee, the main inventor of the World Wide Web, is also credited with being the first to use blue hyperlinks. Mosaic, a browser very early, its interface is used in the very ugly grey background and black text, at the same time, can be easily distinguish from black text out of the deepest color is blue, therefore, in order to the demarcation of hyperlinks from plain text to and does not affect its readability, blue is very lucky to be selected.”
Example 1 — Facebook, Example 2 — Google, Example 3 — Flickr, And Example 4 — LinkedIn
Translation: http://www.fastcompany.com/3009317/why-is-facebook-blue-the-science-behind-colors-in-marketing
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