By Yan Meng and Eugene Y. Chan
Consumer products come in various colors. When Apple launched the iPhone 12, it was available in black, white, blue, green, and red. At IKEA, consumers can purchase Billy bookcases in white, brown, birch, and black-brown. Does buying a product in a certain color affect how consumers think and what they do afterward?
Our research, published in Psychology & Marketing, focused on buying products in white and black colors—after all, many products come in these two colors (think about the iPhone). Might buying white- and black-colored products affect how charitable people are?
What We Found
In six experiments, we found that consumers buying products in a white color subsequently become less prosocial, while those who buy products in black become more so. This is because people have been conditioned to see objects in white color as potentially “morally good” and those in black color as potentially “bad.” When they buy a product in white color, then, they might think they are doing something morally good and when they buy a product in black color, they might think they are doing something morally bad. People who buy white‐colored products should feel licensed to behave less prosocially afterward, while those who buy black‐colored products should be more prosocial as they feel a need to compensate for their initial misconduct.
For example, in one of our studies we had participants go through an online shopping process, akin what one would go through on Amazon, to buy a white or black coffee mug, without any other logos or text emblazoned on it. Then, we measured participants’ intentions to perform volunteer work or donate money to Greenpeace. We found that people who went through the process of buying a black-colored coffee mug expressed greater volunteering intentions and donated more money to Greenpeace, compared to those who went through the process of buying a white coffee mug. This difference was statistically mediated by participants’ lower moral self-concept. That is, buying a black coffee mug temporarily lead people to see themselves as “bad apples,” motivating them to donate and help out more as a means to restore their moral self-worth.
Implication
Our work suggests the important consequences of buying products in different colors. Since products come in a variety of colors—and white and black are perhaps the two most common ones—our work suggests that buying a common product in different colors has the potential to even affect societal well-being. For example, Apple releases their iPhones often right before the holiday season, which usually is the donation season, and their iPhones are available in white and black, among other colors. Someone who buys a white iPhone during the holiday season might donate less money or donate less food to the food bank.
Our results also has implications for non-profits and other charitable organizations. Certainly, non-profit organizations cannot influence consumers’ choice of products, whether depending on the color or otherwise. But charitable organizations can gather data to ascertain the popularity of products in different colors segmented geographically, and then launch charitable appeals in communities in which black-colored products are more common. Charitable appeals in areas where white-colored products are more common instead might elicit fewer donations, our findings would suggest.
Intriguingly, although we focus on product color, our findings may also pertain to the color of the packaging. It’s quite possible that buying a product in a black-colored packaging might lead to the same effects, as consumers might feel they are buying a “bad” product, increasing their intentions to donate and help out.
Theoretically, our findings are rooted in how people don’t buy just products but “meanings” associated with the products. This explains why people buy Ferraris and not a simpler Ford Taurus–people buy the luxury and high self-esteem meanings associated with the Ferrari brand. But there are also meanings associated with color. Red is fierce, green is environmentally-friendly, while blue is open and calm. Our findings indicate that people link black colors to moral badness and white colors to moral goodness, explaining why people see buying a black-colored product to be doing something bad, because they perceive themselves buying a product that they assign “evilness” to. These “moral meanings” that people assign to consumer products, we show, can have grave implications for how we think of ourselves as moral individuals and how we act prosocially afterwards.
