选择红色还是蓝色——背景色彩影响视觉新产品评估的现象、中介及边界体制研究

To Choose Red or Blue? Investigating Whether,When and Why Background Colors Will(Will Not) Affect Visually New Product Evaluations

为提高新产品的市场接受度,品牌经理和零售商常会精心选取呈现新产品时的背景色彩。尽管如此,迄今为止还没有研究探讨背景色彩是否及如何影响消费者对新产品的评估。本文检验了背景色彩和新产品评估间的动态关系,来自消费者和品牌经理的数据都显示:蓝色背景会促使人们更加偏爱中度不一致(vs.一致)的产品,而红色背景下人们对两类产品的评价相似(实验1-2)。这是因为,蓝色(vs.红色)背景激发了关系加工,促进了人们对中度不一致的解决(实验2)。当人们的个人控制感低(vs.高)时,他们开始有意识地关注背景色彩,此时他们的新产品评估将不再受背景色彩的影响(实验3)。

In order to attract consumers to adopt new products, brand mangers and retailers may put much emphasis on background colors in which the new products are displayed. Quite often, we may find that companies use red backgrounds to highlight the detailed product infor- mation, and use blue backgrounds to intensify the relationships among the advertised products. Although this phenomenon may be quite ubiq- uitous, we are still lack of systematical investigation on why companies employ the above practices and when such practices will be invalid. This research examined the dynamic relationship between back- ground colors and new product evaluations. We propose that a blue background may cause consumers to prefer the moderately incon- gruent products to the congruent products, while a red background instead, may lead to comparable evaluations of both products. The underlying mechanism is that blue versus red backgrounds can stimu- late people to engage in more relational processing and thus facilitate moderate incongruity resolution. We further propose that under a low feeling of personal control, consumers tend to make unbiased product valuations, and thus background colors will no longer influence their new product evaluations. We conducted three experiments to examine the above propositions. In Experiment 1, consumers （college students） were asked to eval- uate their preference for a moderately incongruent wrist watch or a congruent one which was displayed in the blue or red background. In Experiment 2, brand managers were invited to indicate their opinions on the newly developed moderately incongruent soft drink or congru- ent soft drink. In Experiment 3, we manipulated participants＇ feelings of personal control and used another product category （camera） as the stimulus. Then participants in Experiment 3 followed similar proce- dures in Experiments 1-2. Results in these experiments were consis- tent and provided robust support to our propositions. The current research contributes to the research on moderate incon- gruity effect by finding that this effect could be influenced by envi- ronmental factors. Moreover, we contribute to the research on color and information procession by building a theoretical linkage between them. We believe this paper could provide useful implications to com- panies＇ strategic new product promotion.