It's no secret that color psychology plays a huge role in the business world. However, should you overdo it and let everything depend on the colors? And what is snake oil and?
Here are some thoughts and experiences that Jörg Dennis Krüger addresses in this episode.
TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST
Hello, my name is Jörg Dennis Krüger, and yes, as my IT technician at reception said:
I am the Conversion Hacker. Welcome to the new edition of “Conversion Hacker Podcast”.
Today with the topic of colors and color psychology.
I'm a big fan, as well as a skeptic, of psychology in online marketing, psychology in marketing, because psychology has a few problems. Among other things, psychology is often not that reproducible, i.e. psychological studies. And most of the time, the factors that change people's behavior are incredibly complicated. So that things that are found in one environment and are then attributed to psychological factors suddenly don't work at all or work completely differently in another environment. Psychology doesn’t have this “if – then” that we actually always like to have. So if something is red, then the user does that.
And that is a transition from psychology to color, because the psychological components that are attributed to colors are very superficial, in many cases. Red is a warning color. Yes, but red is also the color of love, and red is the color with which we have learned to associate discounts and things like that. So what kind of color is red from a psychological perspective? What happens in a person's head when they see something red?
From my point of view, not that much, except that red is a color that is perceived excellently. That's why it's used as a warning color for "stop", for red lights, and that's perhaps why it has such value for love, because that's how it's perceived. Our blood is red. We have been conditioned for eons to associate red with certain things, but these days it no longer just means “warning and help”, that is absolutely not possible! There are enough companies with red logos that are very successful, and it's not like, "Oh God, all the customers are running away now because there's something red," but color always needs context.
So, in context, the red can seem like something that is incredibly positive. Wait, red prices in an online shop have a positive effect because they show me that this price is a discount price. So next to it the price is crossed out, then the price is written next to it in red, and then I know from experience: “This is a discount price” and that catches people’s eyes. Great, there are discounts! This usually works much better than using a green price or something similar. And that's just the general fussing around: "No, I'd rather not use some colors because there's something associated with them." You always have to see the context.
Many colors on a page either work well or don't work because other colors are present or not. If my site is already red overall, for example because I have a red logo, then red prices may not be as effective as in a shop that actually has other colors. And in this respect, this is exactly the dilemma that we see everywhere in psychology, that it always depends on the context.
I will talk about the “reproduction problem” in psychological research in another podcast episode. There are now major problems reproducing results from studies in psychology. So studies that have been done over the past 50 years and maybe even longer are currently trying to reproduce them and trying to recognize, “Is the result something that will happen again if we do the study exactly the same again?”
And you always notice, “No, that won’t happen again.” And in some areas it has been found that the smallest changes to the study design cause people's behavior to be completely different. Because such psychological factors are perceived by people in an incredibly, even detailed, incredibly sensitive way. And then the smallest changes are enough for such a psychological, alleged model, alleged “best practice” to work or not work.
And especially in psychology, relying on studies isn't particularly effective. In some areas you can learn a lot from psychological things. But especially when it comes to colors, for example, this whole color psychology topic is completely useless in my opinion. It's kitchen psychology, kitchen table psychology, homeopathy squared, I have no idea, it doesn't work in most cases.
And that is also the reason why the whole topic of neuromarketing and all the agencies and providers who focused on it for a while have now disappeared so much from the market. Because it simply doesn't work as promised and in many cases it's more like snake oil.
Snake oil? There is no snake oil! Snake oil is a term for selling things that just don't work. Just like in the Wild West the traveling traders from village to village who sold something unknown for pain or whatever, for clean teeth and so on. In the end it was just nothing, and of course you're lucky with that. This works either by chance, or by a placebo effect, or by accidentally doing other things right. If I brush my teeth with something unfamiliar, I will have less pain or cleaner teeth than if I don't brush them at all. So snake oil doesn't mean it doesn't work at all. But that means that what works is more of a coincidence or side effects.
Okay, so “long story short”, to summarize again: when it comes to colors, pay attention to the surroundings. Don't take any weird psychological models into account, but instead look at, "Does this color fit with my shop?" "Does this color fit with how the entire shop is designed?" , on the side?”
And maybe in the next podcast episode we’ll talk about the topic of “attention” and “attention analysis” for websites. There are some really great tools that can help you identify which elements of a page are likely to attract a lot of attention and which are not. And then you can also control attention using color. But here too it's about differences and not about absolute colors.
So I hope this helped you a little, write me your feedback to jdk@jdk.de and feel free to leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or rate and subscribe to the podcast on Apple and Spotify. If you have feedback, as mentioned before, jdk@jdk.de.
I look forward to it. So see you next issue. Your Dennis Krüger.
