How Color Affects the Effectiveness of Taste- versus Health-Focused Restaurant Advertising Messages

Abstract

Despite the ubiquitous use of taste-focused and health-focused advertising messages, the existing advertising literature offers little guidance on how the persuasiveness of such messages might be enhanced through design elements such as color. To address this gap, the current research examines the new congruency of a visual design element (i.e., color) and a verbal design element (i.e., message type) and explores how color may facilitate the persuasion of taste-focused versus health-focused advertising messages. The message–color congruency effect is examined across two studies with between-subjects experimental designs utilizing an Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mturk) consumer panel. The findings suggest that taste-focused advertising messages combined with color imagery and health-focused advertising messages combined with black-and-white (BW) imagery can effectively boost consumer responses, including attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the restaurant, purchase intention, and willingness to pay (WTP). Furthermore, mediation analyses demonstrate that the proposed message–color congruency effect is driven by consumers’ subjective experience of “feeling right” during information processing. Implications for designing advertisements are discussed.

Notes

1 We chose beef as the main ingredient because beef may be perceived as either healthful (Cook, Burton, and Howlett 2013) or unhealthful (Gager, McLean-Meyinsse, and Atkinson 2016). Therefore, the dish could be described as “healthy” or “tasty” because of consumers’ strong “unhealthy = tasty” and “healthy = not tasty” intuitions (Raghunathan, Naylor, and Hoyer 2006).

2 We used a color pattern with multiple hues as the base pattern for color conditions. Moreover, we employed colored fonts for text and highlighted the words that convey taste or health messages. We kept saturation, hue, and value of each included ad’s color constant among color conditions. For BW ads, we used the color pattern as the base pattern but adjusted the saturation and value to make it BW. Between color conditions, and between BW conditions, we kept specifications of these three features constant.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bin Wang

Bin Wang (PhD, Ohio State University) is a professor of consumer sciences, Business School, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, Dalian, China.

Stephanie Q. Liu

Stephanie Q. Liu (PhD, Pennsylvania State University) is an assistant professor of hospitality management and consumer sciences, Department of Human Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Jay Kandampully

Jay Kandampully (PhD, University of Exeter) is a professor of consumer sciences, Department of Human Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Milos Bujisic

Milos Bujisic (PhD, University of Central Florida) is a clinical associate professor of integrated marketing and communications, Division of Programs in Business, School of Professional Studies, New York University, New York, New York, USA.