Saddington Baynes Reveals The Importance of Colour in Latest White Paper

Leading neurocreative production studio, Saddington Baynes, has released a research-based white paper on the influence and effects of colour in advertising. Inspired by the common knowledge that different colours evoke specific emotional responses, the white paper details just how far people’s perception of the world is intrinsically tied to the colours it is painted in, and how brands could take advantage of this insight. 

Using their award-winning visual optimisation tool - Engagement Insights, Saddington Baynes were able to explore how colour and tone impact the way consumers respond to advertising. Focusing on five key marketing metrics: progressive, distinctive, quality, emotional pull and sector value, they measured the non-conscious responses to images from 300 campaigns from 50 different brands, across 30,000 consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Through testing sector-specific attributes such as gender and region, the white paper encourages brands to work with colour in a new way to increase overall engagement of their campaign. The results were analysed, using both the dominant colour and the overall average colour, identifying clear correlations between how light or dark an image was and its emotional resonance. 

The study shows the intuitive use of colour is a perfect tool for marketers, as it helps drive emotional resonance and triggers associations. Knowing how to manipulate colour gives brands a clear advantage and helps minimise the risk when making creative choices.

Key insights:

• Impact of tonality: overall, lighter tones drive more positive emotional responses (98% confidence). Anchoring tonality emotions means that we now know the hue for ‘distinctive’.
• Context is linked to changes in emotional responses with sectors seeing different correlations. For example, beverage imagery is the only sector where darker content is perceived as less premium.
• Lighter and brighter wins big when you are trying to create the feeling of feminine. Interestingly the colour of feminine is perceived differently in women vs men. Men associate lighter tones with being significantly more feminine than women do. 
• High contrast between product and background evokes more positive emotions in consumers. For example, imagery with light backgrounds and light products did not perform well in the automotive sector. Brands can now understand what the optimal background/car colour combination is.

Callum Gould, head of insights at Saddington Baynes, comments: “A scientific way to understand imagery and the emotional responses in relation to it is the dream, not only from a researcher's perspective, but also for a creative. Understanding the impact tonality has and effectively relating colours to specific emotions gives our creative teams a massive advantage. It means they can have greater confidence in the decisions they make. This white paper offers some amazing insights in an area which is not well understood and we are thrilled to be sharing it with the world!”

You can download the white paper HERE.