Science finds colours most alluring

The eagle-eyed among us rally to red and the Mr Magoos are wooed by blue.

So says Diana Derval of the market research firm DervalResearch, whose newest findings are based in neuroendocrinological science. Professor Derval, who says her research shows that visual acuity determines our favourite and least favourite colours, will present these findings at the Association for Research on Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) conference in January.

According to DervalResearch, near-sighted people - those with myopia - tend to prefer short-wave colours like blue, whereas far-sighted folks (hyperopia) gravitate to long-wave colours such as red.

It's all a matter of simple physics, Professor Derval explains. Each colour refracts differently; in other words, colours hit different places on the retina according to their wavelength. Short-wave colours such as blue and violet target the front, whereas long-wave colours such as red and yellow hit the back. The focal point of the eye is the place where all colour waves meet after passing the lens, but the exact location of the focal point varies among individuals.

"Because near-sighted people focus light closer to the front of the retina," explains Professor Derval, "watching blue colours is effortless for them. To perceive red colours, on the other hand, they have to tense the ocular muscles." Conversely, far-sighted people have a shorter eyeball and the focal point is beyond the retina. Looking at red is easy on their eyes, whereas gazing at blue requires that they tense the ocular muscles. People tend to gravitate towards the colours that relax them, Professor Derval says.

DervalResearch conducted the research on men and women of various ethnicities - Chinese, Caucasian, African and Middle-Eastern. Subjects reported their lower-order aberrations (near-sightedness or far-sightedness), and then declared which colour they preferred, which colour they found relaxing and which colour they found irritating. The reported colours were classified by their wavelength in nanometres. Professor Derval found the correlation between visual acuity and colour preference to be slightly stronger in women than in men.

Patrick Jansen, owner of the optics shop New Optics, in Belgium, and Chairman of the Carl Zeiss Academy, in Belgium, decided to put this scientific approach to the test when designing a recent advertising campaign.

New Optics sent out 1000 invitation cards advertising a special offer. One side of the card was printed on a blue background with the blurb, "If you choose this colour side you must be near-sighted; let's talk about it the next time you visit." The reverse was printed on a red background with, "If you choose this colour side you must be far-sighted; let's talk about it the next time you visit."

Jansen says that 100 people visited the shop with their invitation, and most near-sighted people did indeed prefer the blue side, saying that blue had been their favourite colour since their childhood. Most far-sighted people preferred red.

DervalResearch is riding the wave of a brave new trend in 'neuromarketing', which combines cutting-edge neuroscience with marketing research. And there's a lot more to the research than simply determining people's colour preferences based on their visual aberrations.

The company's findings also target those other four senses: taste, touch, smell and hearing. Most intriguingly, there is a hormonal connection to all of this sensory research; that's the 'endocrinological' part. "Users are unique individuals but they are also predictable," says Professor Derval. "Their preferences and behaviour are directly linked to their biological and sensory perceptions. And these perceptions are greatly due to the influence of prenatal hormones."

Drawing upon thousands of measurements in over 25 countries, DervalResearch developed a powerful and predictive biological segmentation tool, the Hormonal Quotient (HQ). "We have discovered that people's perception of products and services - via their taste buds, hair cells in the inner ear, rod and cone cells in the eyes, and skin sensors - is linked to their HQ," she says. "Knowing users' HQ makes it possible to predict not only their favourite colours, but also their preferred tastes, smells, shapes, textures and sounds."

DervalResearch's HQ tool was developed by studying over 50 target groups, including top executives, housewives, entrepreneurs, purchasing managers and opinion leaders. From this, Derval was able to determine eight different HQ profiles.

Applied properly, Professor Derval says, these profiles will allow firms to design and deliver the right user experience across their markets, predicting users' sensory perceptions, purchasing behaviour and product preferences based on their biological profiles. "Companies no longer need to conduct traditional, recurrent and costly surveys," she says. "They just have to identify the profile and HQ of their users once."

A wide range of industries - food and beverage, electronics, luxury items, fashion, cosmetics, automotive, pharmaceuticals, advertising, leisure and tourism, to name but a few - could benefit from this research.

But this research is not all about luring users to spend more of their hard-earned money. Besides allowing marketers to fine-tune their approach and deliver the optimal sensory mix to specific market segments, Professor Derval says her work has many other useful applications. "This research will make it easier to adapt medical, public and private services to individuals who are sensitive to certain colours," she explains.