Color lore in the advertising industry
| The advertising industry is laden with mythology, like “people don’t read long ads,” “offers don’t work on intelligent people,” and “if it’s truly creative, it will sell.” One area of advertising mythology that I don’t often address is color. I tend to leave that area alone because, unlike a lot of advertising “gurus” I have known, I prefer not to opine on things I know little about. I’m a strategist and a writer, not a designer. |  Remember all that stuff about color you learned in design school? Welllll .... |
So today it is my pleasure to commend you to this post by cognitive psychologist Barbara A. Drescher, who actually researched the topic. Here is an excerpt to whet your appetite:
My husband, who is an art director by trade, was taught many of these myths as fact in his color theory course at Savannah College of Art and Design ... They are so ubiquitous that I made the effects of color on emotion my first research project as a psychology undergrad, then continued the work for more than a decade, including a Master’s thesis on the topic.
But 95% of them are bullshit.
What you’ll find when you look up the sources cited (if there are any) for most of these claims is usually a book written by a man named Faber Birren ... his research methods are seriously, seriously flawed. ...
... When I set out to study this problem all those years ago, I noted three fundamental challenges that most researchers failed to meet ...
—Steve Cuno
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