Colour Emotion

Colour plays a significant role in global marketing communication, as colour not only helps enhance brand recognition, but it also translates intended visual impressions into design elements of a product, it can create desired atmosphere in a retail outlet and influence consumers' behaviour.

The impact of colour can be attributed to a wide range of colour associations, in which colour is seen as either a symbol or a sign. The former regards colour as representation of physical items or experiences (e.g. red is a symbol of "good luck" in China), while the latter uses colour to provide specific information in visual communication (e.g. red means "stop" as a traffic signal).

In both cases, colour may serve either as an emotion elicitor that creates emotional impact on the viewer (e.g. Chinese people are happy to receive the "red envelopes" on Chinese New Year's Eve), or as an emotion messenger, sending a communicative signal describing affective quality of the colour itself or of the environment/product (e.g. a vivid red is often regarded as a warm, exciting colour).

Colour as an emotion messenger has attracted enormous interest from researchers in different disciplines, who have given various names to work in this area such as "colour meaning", "colour image", "colour emotion" and "expectations". For consistency, and following the tradition of previous work by the authors, the term colour emotion will be used in this paper to indicate the subject area described here.