11/1/2013

Submitted By | KEERTHI NAGENDRA

BUSINESS
COMMUNICATION
ASSIGNMENT
Article Review :Are You Selling
the Right Color? A Cross-cultural
Review of Color as a Marketing
Cue

Article Review:
Are You Selling the Right Color? A Cross-cultural Review of Color as a
Marketing Cue

MUBEEN M. ASLAM
School of Marketing, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia

The author reviews the socio-cultural and psychological associations and meanings
of colors in a cross cultural marketing perspective and outlines their role as a cue to
the product, package, brand or environment as a symbol of personality and self-
image. Also, the article examines the effects of colors in marketing and in
particular dealings with meaning of colors from marketing perspective and whether
color preferences could predict future purchase behavior.
Traditional beliefs have always been influencing our color preferences and from
our traditional and cultural values the background meaning of colors emerged. For
e.g., Red in India is considered a holy color, Renaissance symbolized four
elements of nature with four colors: scarlet with fire, white with earth, blue with air
and purple with water. But the fact is that physical world has no colors; there are
only light waves of different wavelengths. It depends on the retinal cords of human
to distinguish among such bands of light.
Hence colors are in the mind of humans, not in physical world and since it is
psychological nature, there comes 2 major schools of thought relating to color and
human behavior. The first one says that color reactions could be innate or
instinctual origin (Humphrey, 1976) or of learned or associative origin
(Langenbeck, 1913). The first school argues that color signals the brain to trigger
an affective reaction directly, whereas others suggest that color preferences are
learned over time as shared affective meanings or as result of past experiences or
as conscious associations in language, literature and myths.
With regard to cross cultural meanings and associations of individual colors, white
symbolizes mourning or death in East Asia, but happiness and purity in Australia
and USA, similarly Blue is perceived as cold and evil in East Asia but stands for
warmth in Netherlands and purity in India.. Hence different colors have different
meanings in various countries. Therefore, it becomes more important for a
marketer to carefully select colors since color is a vital part of products, services,
packaging, logos etc. It serves as a cue for product differentiation and
identification.
The author discusses about different components of product marketing and strategy
to select relevant colors. This strategy includes understanding product and category
imagery, product differentiation, self image, country of origin effects, package
colors, brand color selection. The next step is to understand how to effectively
communicate through colors like advertising, atmospherics etc.
The following are proposed.
To summarize, the following were proposed:
A cross-cultural perspective of color research and application is vital for
developing global marketing strategies.
The cultural values, marketing objectives and desired customer relationship
levels in the target market determine the choice of color in making global or
local marketing decisions.
Both culturally and structurally stable branding and packaging models maximize
the marketing goals of the firm.


Source:
Journal of Marketing Communications, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1530, March 2009

Submitted By:
Keerthi Nagendra
Roll No-28,
Section-A