The Perceptual Impact of Naming Colors

Sun Young Ahn, Purdue University

Abstract

Color is a spectrum of light, and a color is defined by its three physical properties, hue, value and intensity. When colors come to the discourse in the real life or industries, they are communicated by their names. Especially, the industries that mainly deal with colors as their products develop their own unique color-naming system while ordinary people tend to use general color names such as red, light blue or dark green. Color names not only define physical properties of a color, but also contribute to building an impression of a color by stimulating associations. This paper investigates how color names impact viewers’ color perception by conducting a survey. Two sets of color swatches from Pantone’s Fashion Color Report from 2000 to 2015 were evaluated by 173 participants based on six criteria: Hardness, Coolness, Masculinity, Age, Luxuriousness and Trendiness. Each set had eleven colors and only the second set presented colors with their names. There were five repeating colors in the two sets, and the result validates that color names affect how people perceive colors by showing different ratings from the two different presentations. Color names can be classified into three sub-groups: general color names, object-based color names and creative color names by their lexical structures, functions, origins and so on. The names used for repeating colors in this survey: Jewel blue, Dried herb, Toasted almond, Rose dust, Silver cloud and Slate gray belong to the object-based color names. Specifically, Jewel blue and Slate gray are compounds of well-known objects and basic color terms, and Silver cloud and Rose dust are compounds of two different objects. From the survey, it was found that those color names enhanced the Luxuriousness and Trendiness of colors, and their perceptual impact showed different tendencies depending on different demographic variables including gender, cultural background and clothing purchase frequency. Those findings suggest that color naming can be a marketing strategy that positively impacts customers’ clothing purchase decisions, and the strategy should be set differently for different target audiences.

Degree

M.F.A.

Advisors

Sigman, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Linguistics|Design|Communication

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