Over the past few months somthing new has presented itself that at first seemed rather surprising. When our company got bought out we were given new red shirts as part of our uniform. Our old company had provided white shirts. No big deal? Our company has told us that we can wear whatever we want to work as long as it is presentable. What I have noticed is the days I wear my red shirt to work, sales seem easier to make! As I have not ha

Other people have also looked ad the affect of color in advertising. In the above mentioned experiments the primary focus was on the motivation of the consumer. By this, the overall wants and this looked at desires of the consumer. Other researchers have looked to see if there are color preferences specific to males and females. They have also looked to see if the are color preferences based on ethnic background. Barnes and Lee (1990) used a variety of magazines to look at the color preferences of males and females as well as white people and black people. "Sandage, Fryburger, and, Rotzoll (1979) suggest that color may serve such functions as attracting attention, assisting in interpretation of product attitudes, giving life to otherwise bleak looking advertisement, and emphasizing or highlighting a distinctive trademark or symbol." Color advertisements have been shown to attract 50% more readers than a black and white ad. (Auchincloss, 1978). What Barnes and Lee used for resources were Jet magazine (for the black magazine), People magazine (for the white people), Woman's Day

Forty-two subjects participated in this experiment. The clothing ads were "assessed by having subjects rate on a seven-point scales the extent to which the ad claims stimulated their imagination, brought memories to mind, related to the things they knew about or could imagine, or made them think about other products or their own experience"(Meyers-Levy + Peracchio 13). What they found was that ads based on image consumed more resources (X=5.42) than ads based on function (X=3.24). From the results a three-way interaction of processing motivation by type of ad claim by ad color for the bicycle and the clothing ads. In the ad for the bicycle and the ad for the clothing, when it was highly resource demanding, ads in black and white or color highlighted were still favored. In ads where there wasn't as many resources used ads in full color were favored. They also showed that when the amount of resources that were used was low, the subjects had more positive thoughts about the product than when the resource level was high. This showed that motivation was influenced not only by ad claim but also ad color.

Bustanoby, J.H. (1947) "Principle of Color and Color Mixing" NY

Some studies have shown that the impact that color plays in an advertisement depends on two key factors. These factors include the total number of colors used in the advertisement and the extent to which the ad is mentally demanding (Durrett and Stimmell 1982)

Meyers-Levy and Peracchio (1995) used two experiments to determine the effect of color on ad processing and attitudes towards products. In their first experiment they focused on how differing demands affected processing of full color and black and white ads. They used an ad for a bicycle that was laid out in four different formats. The first was black and white with all pertinent information grouped together and placed in a bulleted list. In the second format the ad was in color and had all information placed in a bulleted list. In the first and second format the bulleted lists had arrows pointing towards the respective parts that they mention. These were considered the "more resource demanding ad versions" In the third layout the important information was laid out over the whole page. This time the bullets were by themselves w

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