Behaviour Change

PROPAGANDA FOR CHANGE is a project created by the students of Behaviour Change (ps359) and Professor Thomas Hills @thomhills at the Psychology Department of the University of Warwick. This work was supported by funding from Warwick's Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Sony Bravia 'Colour Like No Other'




Filmed in the ordinary streets of San Francisco, attention is drawn to the 170,000 brightly coloured bouncy balls cascading through the city. Gorn et al (1997) created a fictitious paint brand and found that adverts using highly saturated and vivid colours create higher levels of excitement than those using colours with low saturation. It was a single blind experiment using a Likert scale. Participants rated their feelings towards the advert on a number of affective dimensions. Significantly higher levels of excitement were found in participants who viewed the adverts using vivid colours.

Here, Sony have used colour to both focus initial attention and highlight their tagline ‘Colour Like No Other’. Against the ordinary streets the bright colours really stand out and this has been used to suggest that this television brand is the way forward.

The acoustic background music (José González- Heartbeats) also allows the viewer to emotionally engage with the advert. Yoo and MacInnis (2003) used the same visual content but manipulated the audio content in an advert and found that when emotional content is used, more positive feelings are created than when using purely informational content. Little informational content is used in this advert and this is very affective.

Gorn, G. J., Chattopadhyay, A., Yi, T., & Dahl, D. W. (1997). Effects of color as an executional cue in advertising: They’re in the shade. Management Science, 43, 1387-1400.

Yoo, C., & MacInnis, D. (2005). The brand attitude formation process of emotional and information ads. Journal of Business Research, 58, 1397-1406.

1 comment:

  1. This is interesting -- so the Gorn experiment might indicate that the solid colored propaganda ads are indeed more persuasive, simply because the colors are more intense? I wonder if there have been studies on contrast, which would seem to be another aspect of propaganda ads.

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