Opposites attract: Impact of background color on effectiveness of emotional charity appeals

Jungsil Choi, Yexin Jessica Li, Priyamvadha Rangan, Bingqing Yin and Surendra N. Singh

International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2020, vol. 37, issue 3, 644-660

Abstract: The present work utilizes research on context effects and color psychology to investigate how background color can enhance the effectiveness of positive and negative charity appeals. Five experiments measuring both actual donations and donation intention examine the hypothesis that a negative charity appeal against an orange (vs. blue) background and a positive charity appeal against a blue (vs. orange) background will increase donations. We propose that this is because blue and orange colors are incongruous with positive and negative charity appeals, respectively, due to the affective valences of the appeals and the perceptions of warmth and coldness cued by the background colors. This incongruity enhances the attention people pay to the charity appeals, thereby strengthening their emotional response to the appeals, which increases charitable donations. When attention is manipulated, people who pay a high (vs. low) level of attention to the charity appeal are more likely to donate regardless of the color and valence of the appeal, suggesting attention is an important antecedent to the intensity of the emotional response and subsequent donation behavior. We also identify affect diagnosticity as a boundary condition for the effect – when people are informed that color affects their emotions, the contextual effect of color disappears.

Keywords: Donations; Color psychology; Prosocial behavior; Charity appeals; Emotions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811620300082
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:37:y:2020:i:3:p:644-660

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2020.02.001

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Research in Marketing is currently edited by Roland Rust

More articles in International Journal of Research in Marketing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().