How can effectiveness of emotional charity appeals be influenced by colors?

Donations in charity may be influenced by variety of factors. Moreover, portraying photos of both positive and negative emotions can affect donors. When experiencing negative emotions increased helping behavior may be caused by willingness to relive themselves or the observed subject from stress. Experiencing positive emotions may results in desire to keep the enhanced level of own happiness, optimism and control or they want to help due to perceived sympathy towards an observed person.

Previous studies show that various colors may be linked with emotions. For example, compaed to black and white colors in general make people more focused on concrete stimulus. Moreover, orange was found to be associated with happy faces and blue with the feeling of sadness. Research also indicates that incongruency evokes stronger more attention, and more engagement.

The research consists of four parts. First part measures if positive emotions with incongruent blue background will result in higher donations than portrayed negative emotions on congruent blue background. The results show that participants were more likely to donate when seeing positive image with incongruent blue or negative image with incongruent orange color compared to congruent situations (positive image and orange, negative image with blue). That hypothesis was also tested in an email campaign which showed no difference between a positive-orange appeal and a positive-blue appeal. However, the opposite result was statistically significant, a negative-blue appeal got less than incongruent negative-orange appeal.

The second part of the study examines the reason for those donations by measuring willingness to donate, attention levels and emotions that participants of the study experienced when seeing adds with positive and negative messages that were displayed on backgrounds colored with blue, orange, and white. The ANOVA calculation proved that the positive emotions were enhanced when put on blue background and negative emotions when put on orange one. Results also indicated that participants paid more attention to image with a negative communicate than positive one. A further moderated mediation bootstrapping analysis indicated that color and emotion interaction are affected by attention. Further, it was proven that increased donations for participants seeing negative communicates were linked to indicated higher negative emotion and when seeing positive communicates to indicated higher positive emotions.

In third part of the study researchers checked if there would be a change if participants were told that incongruent image and emotions (positive image with blue color and negative image with orange) would affect their attention. It was proven that manipulating participants’ attention has effect on donations and further proves second part of the study.

Forth part of the study was conducted to check impact of informing participants that their emotions can be affected by of external cues. This analysis indicated that participants who know that their emotions may be affected by colors did not display higher donation interest when portrayed emotions are incongruent with color.

In summary, the research found out that putting a image that evokes positive emotions on background colored with a color blue that is associated with negative emotions increases attention and the increased positive emotions result in higher amount of donations. It also showed that the donations are higher when an image evoking negative emotions is put on associated with positive emotions orange background due to higher attention that causes more positive feeling.

Article based on:

J. Choi, Y.J. Li, P. Rangan, et al., Opposites attract: Impact of background color on effectiveness of emotional charity appeals, International Journal of Research in Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2020.02.001