This message has been cross posted to the following Discussions: Governance: Board of Directors and INFORMS Open Forum .
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View this month's President's Pick article from Marketing Science for free in April: http://pubsonline.informs.org/stoken/default+domain/PresidentChoice/full/10.1287/mksc.2014.0882.
The Buffer Effect: The Role of Color When Advertising Exposures Are Brief and Blurred
Michel Wedel, Rik Pieters
Marketing Science (2015). 34(1):134-143. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2014.0882
Commenting on this work, Marketing Science Editor-in-Chief Preyas Desai said "Michel and Rik have been leaders in analyzing "visual" aspects of marketing stimuli and their effects of consumer decisions. New technology and new devices will make their work even more important." Companies such as glanz.tv (which does digital out-of-home advertising, www.glanz.tv) have already begun to implement some of the ideas and findings in this paper.
This article caught my attention since I have long been interested in how visual displays, with or without added color, affect decisions. As a decision analyst, our decision models do not incorporate how a decision format is displayed visually. I'd love to see a new field of "decision and vision" developed jointly by vision researchers and decision analysts/operations researchers. Within our INFORMS journals, perhaps Marketing Science is the farthest along in moving us in that direction?
-Can research on how people perceive quick views of ads provide us suggestions for developing materials for OR applications or teaching?
-What visual displays are involved in your research or practical applications?
-In your teaching, how do you use... visual displays? ...color?
Abstract
What is the role that color plays in consumers' perception of the gist of ads during the increasingly brief and blurred exposures in practice? Two studies address this question. The first study manipulates the level of blur of the exposure and the presence or absence of color in the ad image, during exposures that lasted 100 milliseconds (msec). It reveals a buffer effect of color: color contributes little to gist perception when sufficient visual detail is available and ads are typical, but color enables consumers to continue to perceive the gist of ads accurately when the exposure is blurred. The second study finds that color inversion of the entire ad deteriorates gist perception, but that color inversion of the background scene does not affect gist perception when the exposure is blurred. This provides evidence that the color composition of the central object in the ad scene plays a key role in protecting the gist perception of advertising under adverse exposure conditions. The underlying mechanism is likely to be cognitive rather than sensory. Implications for advertising theory and design are discussed.
Keywords : advertising; drift diffusion model; Bayesian ANOVA; color
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L. Robin Keller
http://www.merage.uci.edu/go/Keller; personal site: http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/lrkeller/
Professor, Operations & Decision Technologies
The Paul Merage School of Business
University of California, Irvine
INFORMS President, 2015, president@mail.informs.org