Why Brands Reach for Blue
Banking, technology and healthcare all converged on the same colour, and the research says that is a convention rather than a persuasive choice. The one blue-specific performance claim failed a replication at more than triple the sample, and no field test of blue on a real commercial outcome has ever been published.
Answer to the question
Why do brands use the colour blue?
Because the colour blue is the most-liked and least distinctive colour available. Across 4,598 people in 30 nations, it carried none of the fourteen prominent colour-emotion associations the study identified, so it offends nobody and signals little beyond the category it has come to stand for. The liking traces to clear skies and clean water rather than to any effect of blue itself.
Key takeaways
- Across 4,598 people in 30 nations, blue carried none of the fourteen prominent colour-emotion associations the study identified.
- Kenneth Steele's 2014 direct replication of the blue-and-creativity result used 263 participants against the original 69 and found nothing the study could detect.
- In the best-designed trust test, more than 200 participants rated identical websites and the authors called the colour effect statistically significant but limited.
- No published field test sets the colour blue against a matched alternative on a real commercial outcome.
Open a banking app, then an insurer, then a hospital portal, and you are looking at the same decision taken three times. The colour blue is the safe choice in commercial design, and safe is the honest word for it. It is the most-liked colour almost everywhere. In the largest cross-national study of colour and emotion ever run, across 4,598 people in 30 nations, it carried none of the fourteen prominent associations the authors list between colour terms and emotion words. That is a convention worth having. It is not persuasion.
Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss on preference
The best available account of why anyone likes a colour does not appeal to the colour at all. Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss set out ecological valence theory in 2010, holding that a colour preference is the average of a person's feelings about the things that colour is usually attached to. Their own worked example is the one this article needs: people like blues because they like clear skies and clean water, and dislike browns because they dislike faeces and rotten food.
Liking is not the same as being moved.
The companion study is sharper. Karen Schloss, with Rolf Poggesi and Stephen Palmer, tested 57 Berkeley and 46 Stanford students on 40 colours one at a time, including the four university colours. Each group rated its own university's colours above the rival's, and the gap widened with self-rated school spirit. The authors read that as preference built from learned association, since nobody picks a university for its palette. Our note on [the mere exposure effect](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/the-mere-exposure-effect-has-a-ceiling) describes the same machinery from the other side.
Follow that through to a market and it becomes awkward for anyone selling colour advice. Where every incumbent is blue, blue is what the category looks like, and a test of the colour blue inside it measures the convention rather than the hue.
Domicele Jonauskaite counts the fourteen associations
In 2020 Domicele Jonauskaite and colleagues asked 4,598 participants from 30 nations, speaking 22 native languages, to associate 20 emotion concepts with 12 colour terms. The patterns were strikingly similar nation to nation, closest between Switzerland and France and loosest for Egypt. Then, in the results rather than the abstract, the paper lists every association prominent enough to clear a probability of four in ten: black with sadness, fear and hate, red with love and anger, pink with love, joy and pleasure, grey with sadness and disappointment, yellow and orange with joy, orange with amusement, white with relief.
The colour blue appears in none of the fourteen.
Fourteen prominent colour-emotion associations, across 4,598 people in 30 nations, and the colour blue carries none of them.
Her 2025 systematic review with Christine Mohr covers 132 articles published between 1895 and 2022, 42,266 participants, 64 countries. Every basic colour category showed systematic correspondences with pleasantness, arousal and power, most of them many-to-many and driven as much by how light and how saturated a colour was as by its hue. Blue landed with green, green-blue and white in the calm, pleasant, undifferentiated cell. The authors add the limit the trade never quotes: because nearly all of this was tested as abstract association, whether it reaches emotion anyone actually experiences in a specific setting remains to be seen.
Ravi Mehta and Kenneth Steele disagree
One paper is the whole basis of the claim that the colour blue does something to a mind. Ravi Mehta and Rui Zhu reported six studies in Science in 2009, arguing that red cues avoidance and blue cues approach, so red sharpens detail work and blue helps on creative tasks. Their creative task ran on 118 participants. They were unusually frank, conceding that earlier findings pointed both ways and that every study was run at one North American university.
Kenneth Steele ran the direct test in 2014, same anagrams, same instructions, same colours, at more than twice the sample, 263 participants, chosen expressly so that an effect of that size could be detected. Nothing the replication could detect appeared. The paper concludes that this calls into question whether the colour-priming effect on anagram solution exists at all. Kenneth Steele also reports, in conference material rather than in the journal, that his laboratory was later told the published procedure was not the one run, the first letters of each solution having been underlined as a hint.
Take both at their strongest. Mehta and Zhu's is a six-study package in the most visible journal in science, with a stated mechanism and a declared scope. Kenneth Steele's is one experiment, but it is the direct test, better powered, and it reports a problem with the original procedure that nobody has resolved. We go with the replication.
The sadder half of the blue story dissolves the same way. Karen Schloss, Christoph Witzel and Leslie Lai held lightness and chroma constant, statistically in one experiment and colorimetrically in another, and found blue hues no sadder than yellow ones and in places happier. Blue looks melancholy in a study because the blues tested were darker, not because they were blue. The honest other half: yellows keep the greatest potential to look happiest, because they can be light and saturated at once. Redness and anger, which [What Red Actually Does](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-red-actually-does) covers, is the association that really does track hue.
Satyendra Singh, Adam Alter and provenance
The single most cited document in applied colour marketing is seven pages long and contains no study. Satyendra Singh's 2006 paper in Management Decision is a narrative review with no participants and no data, and its abstract carries a headline figure about colour and snap judgements that the trade has repeated ever since. That figure has no citation in the abstract, none in the body, and nothing in the reference list behind it. The fault is in the sourcing rather than in the man, and it is the reason we will not print the number in any form.
The same paper then settles the question the decks never raise. In its own words, no direct evidence that specific restaurants using specific colours increased sales was documented, after which it generalises that careful colour choice can influence which restaurants people patronise. It also reports a source suggesting that blue stimulates the sympathetic nervous system most, notices that this contradicts the calmness story, and leaves the contradiction standing.
Provenance is a thing a reader can check in five steps:
- Find the paper the figure is attributed to.
- Read whether that paper collected anything or only reviewed.
- Look for a citation beside the number itself, not elsewhere in the text.
- Note what was measured, a rating or a purchase.
- Ask which hues were tested, and whether the conclusion names them.
Adam Alter's Drunk Tank Pink, from 2013, is the clearest case study of what happens when nobody runs those steps, and read carefully it is evidence for our side. The book's Prologue uses blue as the control condition, its colour chapter mentions blue only as streetlights and as the cool pole of a contrast, and nowhere in it does the colour blue do anything to a person.
Alter's own endnotes list more non-supporting than independently supporting studies for his title claim, and disclose a commercial interest held by the researcher behind it. Those endnotes track a colour claim from a fringe journal to a prison wall to a bedsheet catalogue without it ever acquiring evidence. [The Psychology You Learned Didn't Replicate](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/the-psychology-you-learned-didnt-replicate) argues that pattern out in full.
Alex Holcombe and Wouter Alberts on limits
Alex Holcombe named the field's structural problem in 2019, and his first sentence names blue: published claims include that viewing blue causes calmness, and almost all of them rest on testing one hue. He compares it to testing one Toyota and one Tesla and then concluding something about Toyotas in general. He could find no paper stating its conclusions in terms of the hues it tested. Two lights that look identically blue to a person, he notes, can act differently on the brain. Powering a five-hue study properly, on his own estimate, would take 650 participants in a laboratory.
Zena O'Connor had made the adjacent point eight years earlier, in the field's own journal. She named "blue is calming, relaxing and healing" as the stock assertion made authoritatively while evidence is rarely cited.
Her recommendation was caveat emptor.
The best-designed laboratory study on the thing brands actually want is modest about itself. It rated mock-ups rather than following customers. Wouter Alberts and Thea van der Geest had more than 200 participants rate eight finance, eight legal and eight medical websites for trustworthiness, each person seeing one site at a time, identical apart from its colour scheme across red, blue, green and black. The blue scheme came out most trustworthy and black least.
| What was tested | What was measured | Size the authors claim |
|---|---|---|
| Four colour schemes on identical website mock-ups, in a laboratory | First impression of trustworthiness | Significant but limited |
| Dark blue against light blue online | Booking intention | Indirect, through trust |
| Blue against red on anagram solving | Solution times | Nothing the study could detect |
Peter Broeder and Hessel Snijder's 2019 experiment is the closest anyone gets to commerce, and the comparison it runs is blue against blue. Across 216 Chinese and Dutch respondents, a darker blue accommodation page raised booking intention indirectly, through trust. An intention is not a booking.
### What this cannot settle
No field test of the colour blue against a matched alternative on a real commercial outcome has been published, so far as we can find. That absence is the most important fact in this article, and it is why nobody can tell a bank what repainting would be worth.
Three more limits, stated rather than buried. We are not claiming colour does nothing: 132 articles and 42,266 participants found real correspondences, and hue genuinely carries redness and anger. Lauren Labrecque and George Milne's 2012 paper is where the link between blue and judged competence comes from, and it is a four-study ratings design on brand-personality scales; we could not retrieve its study-level detail and so quote no figure from it. And no source anywhere establishes why any particular bank or hospital chose its palette. The convergence is a fact about the market. The motive is not evidenced.
Which leaves the colour blue roughly where a careful buyer should want it: a colour almost nobody dislikes, standing for a category almost everybody recognises. Blue is what a category looks like once everyone has agreed, and agreement is a cheaper thing to buy than belief.
Common questions
Why do brands use the colour blue?
Because it is the most-liked colour and one of the least distinctive. Across 4,598 people in 30 nations, the colour blue carried none of the fourteen prominent associations that study found between colour terms and emotion words, so it offends nobody and signals little. Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss trace the liking to clear skies and clean water rather than to anything blue does. It is a conventional choice, not a persuasive one.
Does the colour blue make people trust a company?
Not on this evidence. Wouter Alberts and Thea van der Geest had more than 200 participants rate identical websites differing only in colour scheme, and the blue version was judged most trustworthy, black least. The authors called that effect statistically significant but limited beside every other reason to trust a site. It is a first impression of a mock-up, not trust in a brand, and no purchase was measured.
Does the colour blue help creative thinking?
The claim is in question. Ravi Mehta and Rui Zhu reported it in 2009, with 118 participants on their creative task. Kenneth Steele repeated the anagram test in 2014 with 263 participants, enough to detect an effect that size, and found nothing the study could detect. He also reports that the published procedure differed from the one actually run. Treat it as unsettled.
Is the colour blue calming?
That claim is older than its evidence. Zena O'Connor identified "blue is calming, relaxing and healing" as the stock assertion made authoritatively while evidence is rarely cited. Blue does group with calm, pleasant emotions in the 128-year review, on association data, and those authors say plainly that whether such associations reach experienced emotion in a real setting remains to be seen.
Sources
Mehta, R., & Zhu, R. (2009). 'Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances.' Science, 323(5918), 1226-1229. doi:10.1126/science.1169144. [Abstract read in full, from the publisher-deposited abstract at the Crossref item record]: six studies, n = 69 for the motivation study, n = 208 and n = 118 for the detail-oriented and creative tasks, n = 42 for product design, n = 161 for persuasive-message evaluation and n = 68 for the outside-awareness study. The authors open by conceding that existing research reports inconsistent findings, some suggesting blue or green beats red and others the opposite. Their claim is that red induces an avoidance motivation and blue an approach motivation, so red enhances detail-oriented performance and blue enhances creative performance, with activation of alternative motivations mediating. Stated scope, in the deposited reference notes: red and blue can imply other associations, the same colour may have different associations across cultures, and all studies were run at one North American university, the University of British Columbia, with participants mostly raised in Canada, mainland China and Hong Kong and aged 17 to 39. Author order confirmed at the Crossref item record: Mehta first, Zhu second, both at the Sauder School of Business.
Steele, K. M. (2014). 'Failure to replicate the Mehta and Zhu (2009) color-priming effect on anagram solution times.' Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21(3), 771-776. doi:10.3758/s13423-013-0548-3. [Abstract read; full text not retrieved]: a direct replication using the same anagrams, instructions and colours, at more than triple the original sample, the author's own conference material giving 263 participants against the original 69 explicitly to increase the likelihood of detecting effects. The results did not show the Mehta and Zhu colour-priming effects even though statistical power was sufficient to detect them, and the abstract concludes that this calls into question the existence of the colour-priming effect on anagram solution. Two further procedural points appear only in the author's conference posters and are recorded as his claims rather than published findings: that the lab was later informed the original procedure did not match the published procedure because the first one or two letters of each solution were underlined as a hint, and that word length was not equated across the three word groups so that mean word length was confounded with the hypothesised motivational status of the words. Sole author, at Appalachian State University, confirmed at the OpenAlex item record, which carries 2013 as the online-first year against the 2014 volume.
Jonauskaite, D., Abu-Akel, A., Dael, N., Oberfeld, D., and colleagues, with Mohr, C. as senior author (2020). 'Universal Patterns in Color-Emotion Associations Are Further Shaped by Linguistic and Geographic Proximity.' Psychological Science, 31(10), 1245-1260. doi:10.1177/0956797620948810. [Full text read, from the open copy at the BI Norwegian Business School repository]: 4,598 participants from 30 nations speaking 22 native languages associated 20 emotion concepts with 12 colour terms. Average nation-to-global pattern similarity r = .880, 95 per cent CI .857 to .903, ranging from .684 for Egypt to .941 for Spain; nation-to-nation similarities averaged .781, from .501 for the Netherlands against Azerbaijan to .951 for Switzerland against France. THE FINDING THIS ARTICLE TURNS ON, taken from the Results section rather than the abstract: the paper lists every prominent colour-emotion association at a probability of .4 or higher, namely black and sadness, black and fear, black and hate, red and love, red and anger, pink and love, pink and joy, pink and pleasure, grey and sadness, grey and disappointment, yellow and joy, orange and joy, orange and amusement, and white and relief. Blue appears in none of the fourteen. Authors' stated scope is universality and its cultural modulation, not marketing. Jonauskaite first author, Mohr senior author, confirmed at the OpenAlex item record; the author list is long and the article credits only those two in prose.
Jonauskaite, D., & Mohr, C. (2025). 'Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of psychological research linking colours and emotions.' Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 32(4), 1457-1486. doi:10.3758/s13423-024-02615-z. [Abstract read in full at link.springer.com, with the Introduction also read]: 132 peer-reviewed articles published in English between 1895 and 2022, covering 42,266 participants from 64 countries. All basic colour categories showed systematic correspondences with valence, arousal and power and with discrete affective terms, but most correspondences were many-to-many, with systematic effects driven by lightness, saturation and hue. On blue the finding is deliberately undramatic: blue, green, green-blue and white with positive low-arousal emotions, blue grouped with three other colours in the least differentiated cell of the map. The authors' own limit on their own result, which the article should quote: as most colour-emotion correspondences were tested at an abstract associative level, it remains to be seen whether they translate to the impact of colour on experienced emotions and specific contexts. The Introduction also records that popular media and the public sector present affective connotations of colour as well established while scientific research is only starting to answer fundamental questions. Two authors only, Jonauskaite first, confirmed at the OpenAlex item record.
Schloss, K. B., Witzel, C., & Lai, L. Y. (2020). 'Blue hues don't bring the blues: questioning conventional notions of color-emotion associations.' Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 37(5), 813-824. doi:10.1364/JOSAA.383588. [Full text read, from the open copy at the University of Southampton repository]: the only paper in the literature whose subject is the blue association itself, and it dissolves it. Experiment 1 controlled lightness and chroma statistically by reanalysing colour-emotion ratings for the 37 Berkeley Color Project colours against the terms happy, sad and angry, n = 48 participants. Experiment 2 controlled them colorimetrically, 20 participants, 14 female and 6 male, judging 32 colours. A supplementary experiment tested 20 new participants on colour matching. The authors' conclusion: when lightness and chroma were controlled statistically and colorimetrically, yellow hues were no happier than blue hues and in some cases blue hues were actually happier, so previous evidence that yellow is happier than blue is likely due to variations in lightness between stimuli rather than hue. They deliberately contrast this with redness and anger, which they predicted and found really does track hue. The honest other half of their finding: yellows retain the greatest potential to be happiest, not because of hue but because they can simultaneously maximise lightness and chroma. Author order confirmed at the OpenAlex item record: Schloss first, Witzel middle, Lai last.
Palmer, S. E., & Schloss, K. B. (2010). 'An ecological valence theory of human color preference.' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(19), 8877-8882. doi:10.1073/pnas.0906172107. [Abstract read; full text not retrieved in this pass]: the explanation for why blue is liked, and it is not about blue. Colour preference is held to arise from people's average affective responses to the objects a colour is associated with, the paper's own worked example being that people like blues because they like clear skies and clean water and dislike browns because they dislike faeces and rotten food. The authors state the theory fits the data better than alternatives with fewer free parameters, against earlier explanations resting on biological adaptation or colour-emotion links. A related 2010 conference paper by the same group reports the theory accounting for about 80 per cent of the variance in average colour-preference ratings from affective ratings of similarly coloured objects; that figure comes from the conference paper and not from the PNAS article and must be attributed accordingly.
Schloss, K. B., Poggesi, R. M., & Palmer, S. E. (2011). 'Effects of university affiliation and school spirit on color preferences: Berkeley versus Stanford.' Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(3), 498-504. doi:10.3758/s13423-011-0073-1. [Abstract read, with participant counts and procedure taken from the Springer full-text record]: the familiarity and affiliation confound demonstrated rather than asserted. 57 Berkeley participants, 75 per cent female, tested at Berkeley; 46 Stanford participants, 72 per cent female, tested at Stanford; 40 colours presented one at a time including the four university colours; no participant colour-deficient on Dvorine Pseudo-Isochromatic Plates; school spirit rated after the colour task so the ordering does not create demand. Each group rated its own university's colours higher than the rival's and the gap grew with self-rated school spirit. Authors' stated reading: support for preference arising from learned associations, since students are unlikely to have chosen a university on the basis of pre-existing colour taste. A further detail relayed by Schloss in personal communication inside a peer-reviewed commentary and recorded as such rather than as a published result: the data show a significant interaction involving another shade of red, so Stanford students liked Stanford red more than they liked a different dark red.
Holcombe, A. O. (2019). 'Color and Categorical Claims.' Meta-Psychology, 3, MP.2019.1652. doi:10.15626/MP.2019.1652. [Full text read]: a peer-reviewed commentary with open reviews, and the sharpest methodological objection in the field. Its opening names blue: published claims include that viewing blue causes calmness and that viewing red decreases test achievement, yet almost all such claims rest on testing just a single hue or sometimes a few. The analogy, usable as it stands: generalising from one hue to a category may be akin to testing one Toyota and one Tesla, finding the Toyota more reliable, and concluding that Toyotas in general are more reliable. Holcombe reports that in the literature he surveyed the majority of papers test only one or two exemplars of a colour category, most individual experiments test only one, and he found no paper stating its conclusions in terms of the specific hue or hues tested. He adds a physiological reason this is not pedantry: two spectra that look identical to a human can stimulate melanopsin differently and the collicular pathway appears to lack short-wavelength cone input, so two lights that look the same blue can act differently on the brain. His cost estimate explains why the field has not fixed it: citing Elliot's own recommendation to power for d = 0.35 at 130 participants per condition between subjects, testing five hues would need 650 participants, in a laboratory rather than online. Five reviewers are named in the published record and two of them are Andrew J. Elliot and Kenneth M. Steele. His two readings of Elliot 2019 are relayed here as his and must be attributed to him in prose: that very little can currently be concluded about the effect of colour on psychological functioning, which he calls a truly dismal outcome for a century's worth of research; and that on the popular hypothesis that red produces excitement, supportive evidence was found in approximately forty studies while nearly twenty did not find the link.
Elliot, A. J., & Maier, M. A. (2014). 'Color Psychology: Effects of Perceiving Color on Psychological Functioning in Humans.' Annual Review of Psychology, 65(1), 95-120. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115035. [PARTIAL ABSTRACT ONLY, and this is a real limitation. The full abstract could not be retrieved: Annual Reviews is paywalled, scinapse.io served a reCAPTCHA challenge, and neither Crossref nor OpenAlex carries a deposited abstract. What was read: the opening, stating that the review looks past colour aesthetics to the link between colour and psychological functioning and covers the historical context and the methodological problems that hampered earlier empirical work]: cited for its existence and its authorship as the field's standing review and for nothing else. Author order confirmed at both the Crossref and the OpenAlex item records: Elliot first at the University of Rochester, Maier second at the University of Munich. The article must not attribute any figure or conclusion to this paper.
Elliot, A. J. (2019). 'A Historically Based Review of Empirical Work on Color and Psychological Functioning: Content, Methods, and Recommendations for Future Research.' Review of General Psychology, 23(2), 177-200. doi:10.1037/gpr0000170. [PARTIAL ABSTRACT ONLY; full text paywalled at SAGE and not read. What was read: that empirical work on colour and psychological functioning dates to the nineteenth century and early research focused on arousal, physical strength, preference, time perception and attention; that the paper reviews those early relations and details methodological weaknesses in them; that it then traces twentieth and twenty-first century developments in content and methods and extends to the full breadth of the domain; and that it closes with guidelines for interpreting existing work and conducting future work]: sole author, confirmed at the OpenAlex item record. Over 260 references by Holcombe's count. Every substantive characterisation of this review in this file is Holcombe's reading of it and must be attributed to him in prose, including the blueprint phrase, the very-little-can-be-concluded summary and the forty-against-twenty count on red and excitement.
Alberts, W. A., & van der Geest, T. M. (2011). 'Color matters: color as trustworthiness cue in web sites.' Technical Communication, 58(2), 149-160. No DOI; indexed at OpenAlex and at the University of Twente research record, ISSN 0049-3155, peer-reviewed, Society for Technical Communication. [Abstract read in full at the University of Twente research record, which carries the publisher abstract entire]: the single most on-point study for this article and the one that gives the honest size. More than 200 participants evaluated eight finance, eight legal and eight medical websites on perceived trustworthiness, each respondent seeing an identical site differing only in colour scheme, with four schemes tested, red, blue, green and black. The same site in different schemes was judged to have different levels of trustworthiness. In the authors' own words, colour has a statistically significant but limited effect compared with all other reasons people can have to trust a website; overall the blue colour scheme was perceived as most trustworthy and black as least trustworthy; and the effect of context is statistically significant but very small. Their conclusion claims novelty, noting the colour-trustworthiness relationship had never previously been demonstrated for websites. The dependent variable is a first impression on a rating scale and no behaviour was measured. Author order at the publisher record: Alberts first, van der Geest second.
Broeder, P., & Snijder, H. (2019). 'Colour in Online Advertising: Going for Trust, Which Blue is a Must?' Marketing - from Information to Decision Journal, 2(1), 5-15. doi:10.2478/midj-2019-0001. [Abstract read in full]: the only study found that attaches blue to anything resembling a commercial intention, and the comparison it runs is blue against blue. An online experiment with 91 Chinese and 125 Dutch respondents, 216 in total, average age 27, shown an accommodation offer in either a predominantly darker or a predominantly lighter valued blue environment. Result: an indirect mediating effect of trust on the relationship between the darker blue environment and booking intention, and no evidence for the hypothesised moderating effect of culture. The authors recommend dark blue schemes to online vendors, especially where the customer is more involved financially or vulnerable in the purchasing process, and their own framing concedes that existing studies on blue and online trust show contrasting results. The outcome measured is booking intention, not a booking. Both authors at Tilburg University, Broeder first, confirmed at the OpenAlex item record.
Labrecque, L. I., & Milne, G. R. (2012). 'Exciting red and competent blue: the importance of color in marketing.' Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 40(5), 711-727. doi:10.1007/s11747-010-0245-y. [ABSTRACT-LEVEL ONLY, and the limitation is material. The study-by-study sample sizes and designs could not be retrieved in this pass: Springer is paywalled, api.semanticscholar.org returned a publisher-elided null, colab.ws returned an empty body, no repository copy was found, and the UMass Amherst dissertation the work derives from was located only as a catalogue record. What was read: the four-study structure, namely that study 1 maps hues onto brand personality dimensions drawing on aesthetics, colour psychology and associative learning, study 2 examines saturation and value as amplifiers of brand personality traits, study 3 covers colour shifting brand personality and purchase intent, and study 4 covers colour and a brand's likability and familiarity]: this is the paper behind the phrase blue is competent, and the framework underneath it is Jennifer Aaker's five brand-personality dimensions, sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. Author order confirmed at both the Crossref and the OpenAlex item records: Labrecque first, Milne second; published online 28 January 2011 in the September 2012 issue. The article may cite it as the source of the association and must describe it as a four-study ratings design on brand-personality scales, and must not quote a sample size or an effect size from it.
Singh, S. (2006). 'Impact of color on marketing.' Management Decision, 44(6), 783-789. doi:10.1108/00251740610673332. [FULL TEXT READ, from the author's own copy hosted at the University of Winnipeg]: sole author, Department of Administrative Studies, University of Winnipeg; received, revised and accepted in March 2006, all in the same month; labelled by the journal CURRENT RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT and self-described as a research paper. It is seven pages of narrative review with no study, no data, no participants and no statistics, and it is the single most influential document in applied colour marketing on the evidence of how often the trade cites it. Four things from it. First, the famous figure has no source anywhere in the paper: the abstract states that people make up their minds within 90 seconds and that about 62 to 90 per cent of the assessment is based on colours alone, and neither sentence carries a citation in the abstract or the body. Second, Singh says plainly that the evidence is not there, writing that the evidence linking specific colours to specific responses is inconclusive, and that the absence of conclusive scientific results has given rise to several speculations, with such advances as exist coming from colour consultancy companies whose nature of experiments is not scientific although the results seem to be in general agreement among marketers. Third, his blue claims are assertions and two of them contradict each other: formal restaurants use blue to calm and relax customers, excessive blue can be an appetite suppressant, and Kido 2000 suggested blue stimulated the sympathetic nervous system the most, which Singh himself notes appears to contradict the generally accepted association of blue with calmness and relaxation, and then leaves unresolved. Fourth, the sentence that settles the field-test question in his own words: no direct evidence that specific restaurants using specific colours increased sales was documented, followed immediately by the generalisation that careful colour choice can influence patronage. Two load-bearing sources are web pages at colormatters.com accessed in November 2002 and a third is a 1988 industry catalogue. One usable fact, properly flagged as secondary: Singh reports Wiegersma and Van der Elst 1988 in Perceptual and Motor Skills 66(1), 308-310, as finding blue the most preferred colour in general across cultures, which the vault has not read and must cite as a secondary report or verify separately.
O'Connor, Z. (2011). 'Colour psychology and colour therapy: Caveat emptor.' Color Research & Application, 36(3), 229-234. doi:10.1002/col.20597. [Abstract read in full, from the publisher-deposited abstract at the Crossref item record]: sole author, and the sceptical position stated at the top of the field's own journal, naming blue in the sentence that matters. The abstract describes a popular-culture literature often presented in an authoritative manner exhorting the reader to believe claims such as that red is physically stimulating and arousing and blue is calming, relaxing and healing, and then states that empirical evidence or evidence of any nature is only rarely cited and, when it is, is often in reference to findings that are inappropriately generalised or out-of-date and superseded. The paper traces the modern claims to Birren, Goldstein, Gerard and Luscher, grants those writers a valid if somewhat dated place in the literature, and concludes that there are compelling reasons for applying the caveat emptor principle to colour psychology and colour therapy claims found in nonacademic sources.