The Neutral Face of Blue: How Color Can Make Consumers Stay Sensitive

According to The Largest U.S. Charities, released by Forbes (Forbes 2017), more than half of the top 50 charities in the US use red, blue, or both in their logos. Despite this widespread use of red and blue, limited research has investigated the use of these colors in donation appeals. A logo’s color, especially its hue, is known to influence marketing outcomes such as perceived benefits or brand personality (Bottomley and Doyle 2006; Labrecque and Milne 2012). The color of a logo may also be associated with meaningful concepts and even unrelated consumer inferences about the entity that the color represents (e.g. ethicality of a practice; Sundar and Kellaris 2017). Past research on color and donation appeals studied how background colors used in donation appeals influenced donation (Choi, Singh, and Rangan 2011; Mehta et al. 2011). However, the influence of logo color, and hues in particular, on prosocial intentions is less understood. The current research investigates how the color of a charity logo influences consumers’ sensitivity to the charitable cause and to donation. One aspect of this is sensitivity to the number of victims. As charitable causes often respond to natural disaster or disease and the number of donation recipients can be massive, examining sensitivity to victim numbers can be crucial. Another important criteria when interpreting the charitable cause is the social distance between donor and victims. Past research has shown that people indicate a greater willingness to help when the social distance between donor and victim is close (Loewenstein and Small 2007; Small and Simonsohn 2007). Given that many global charities ask donors to give to victims in other countries, the question of whether peripheral cues such as color can change the perception of victims is important.