Colour-Product Congruency

What it is

A colour on a package does two jobs at once. It carries whatever meaning shoppers already attach to the colour, and it sits beside a product and a claim that either agree with that meaning or do not. Colour-product congruency names the second part: whether the colour, the product and the message line up.

The idea comes with a tension built in. The literature that Lyons and Wien draw on suggests that congruence is usually judged more appropriate, and also that moderate incongruence can raise preference. A paper on premium evaluations has to say which of the two applies, and the answer in the experiments reported by Sarah Joy Lyons and Anders Hauge Wien was that it depends on the kind of product.

Their starting point was a pair of common marketing habits. Green is often used to signal utilitarian and environmental cues, and red often appears on food logos to create arousal and excitement. They then crossed each colour with a message. For a hedonic product, one bought for pleasure and framed around taste, premium evaluations were higher when colour and framing matched: red with a tasting-delicious message, green with a healthy one. For a utilitarian product, one bought for a practical purpose and framed around health, the pattern reversed and premium evaluations were higher when they mismatched, for example green with a delicious-taste message.

Two things follow from that structure. First, premium is not a property of a hue. The same green or red can raise or lower a premium rating depending on what it sits beside. Second, congruency is a claim about relations, so it cannot be checked by testing one colour alone. It needs the colour, the product type and the message varied together, so a single-colour result, such as a black label rated highly on pasta, says little about congruency by itself.

In effect

In research: the red and green experiments

Lyons and Wien ran two between-subjects experiments published in Food Quality and Preference in 2017. The first used a hedonic product and found higher premium evaluations when red went with a tasting-delicious framing and green with a healthy one. The second used a utilitarian product and found the reverse. Only the abstract was read for this page, so sample sizes and the specific foods are not reported here. The abstract describes the products by type, not by name.

In everyday shopping: the same green on different shelves

The pattern implies that one green label should not be expected to behave the same way on every shelf. Where the product is a pleasure and the message is about health, the abstract's result for hedonic foods predicts a premium reading. Where the product is a practical staple and the message is about taste, the utilitarian result predicts one for the mismatch. This is an application of the paper's structure, not a finding the paper reports for any named product.

In commerce: reading the black-packaging studies

Two experiments have put black on food against other colours. In a 2024 pasta auction, a black label was rated most premium and drew the highest mean bid. In a 2025 German study, a black can was seen as high quality and expensive, and silver and black cans also looked less healthy. Colour-product congruency offers one cautious way to hold those results together: black may read as premium where shoppers expect it in a category and the message agrees, and it may read differently, or carry costs in healthiness, where it does not. That is a reading of the two studies through the congruency idea. Neither study tested congruency, and neither varied the message printed beside the colour.

What it does not say

It does not say that black is premium, or that any other colour is. Black was not in the Lyons and Wien design, which used red and green.

It does not provide a rule for which combinations will work. The 2017 result shows that the direction of the fit differed between a hedonic and a utilitarian product, and the abstract does not give the underlying foods, so the finding describes categories rather than brands.

It does not show that a premium rating translates into purchases. The experiments measured evaluations. Related work on black pasta labels found that premiumness predicted what students were willing to bid, but that was a different study and a different colour set.

The evidence is also thin: two experiments in one paper, read here at abstract level. The concept is best treated as an organising question, whether the colour agrees with the product and the message, and not as an established law of packaging.

---