The Effect of Color vs . Black-and-White on Information Processing

The effects of using color in various forms of marketing communications (e.g., television and magazine advertising, package design) have received much attention from marketing researchers. One area of color effects that has not received much attention is the type of information processing that is elicited from a viewer by color vs. black-and-white (bw) stimuli. We focus on this topic in this research. In particular, we argue that people process the central elements of both color and bw pictures spontaneously. However, color pictures draw a viewer’s attention to the peripheral elements of a picture as well, more so than bw pictures. We further show that the differential attention drawn by color to peripheral elements of a picture can affect some important consumer decisions such as product categorization, feature evaluation, and subsequent choice. Our findings also provide practical guidance for strategic use of color in marketing communications. A picture generally contains the main elements of the object being depicted (e.g., a chair) along with contextual elements (e.g., the color of the chair, the floor, and any other peripheral elements). When exposed to a picture of an object, a viewer’s focus is first drawn to the global shape of the object (Arnheim 1954, 1957; Nojima 2003). However, our vision system is designed to continuously change its focus as it tries to locate the next piece of important information (Janiszewski 1998). In a bw picture, the salience and value of each element are relatively even, thus inhibiting specific parts of the picture from being distinctive. As a result, our visual attention tends to stay focused on the global form of the bw picture, rather than exploring other elements.