Pink Bad for Business?
Posted 8/16/2011
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Now, this is a new twist--an article from the Harvard Business Review that suggests that all the "pinking" is not good for sales. Since business does not seem to listen to my disgust with the pink, maybe they will pay attention to one of their own.
Here is the beginning and a link:
Defend Your Research: The Color Pink Is Bad for Fighting Breast Cancer
by Stefano Puntoni
Nothing makes pink a feminine color except what we think. Pink as a feminine color is a relatively modern phenomenon. Before the 20th century, it was a male color. It may change again. But right now, pink is female and has this effect.How do men react to pinkness?
In one study we asked women to look at two ads about breast cancer. They found a pink ad harder to read than a more gender-neutral peach ad. We wondered if it was contrast or some other optical effect. But when we asked men about the same ads, they thought the pink one was slightly easier to read. We don't know too much beyond this. I will say that seeing more men wearing pink as part of breast cancer awareness may start to break down the color's effect as a gender cue. Or maybe it has an empowering effect on men, who would donate more because of it. We don't know yet.
Do you see a whole new vein of research opening around gender cues?
It's quite new, but we really weren't visionaries at all. It was just good data talking to us. We could have published a paper earlier if we weren't so skeptical of the results in the first place. Over the past 10 years, researchers have put more effort into thinking about consumer welfare. What can we do as researchers to help consumers make better decisions? How can we effect change in areas like overeating and disease prevention? This is part of that. We could go more general with the gender cue research, but breast cancer is such an important disease that I want to study this more on its own.
http://hbr.org/2011/07/defend-your-research-the-color-pink-is-bad-for-fighting-breast-cancer/ar/3
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