The Buffer Effect: The Role of Color When Advertising Exposures Are Brief and Blurred

Michel Wedel () and Rik Pieters ()
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Michel Wedel: Department of Marketing, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742
Rik Pieters: Department of Marketing, Tilburg School of Economics and Management, Tilburg University, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands

Marketing Science, 2015, vol. 34, issue 1, 134-143

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; gist perception; drift diffusion model; Bayesian ANOVA; color (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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