KINGSTON, R.I. – May 1, 2025 – A stroll down the aisles at Target or Walmart reveals a spectrum of colors when it comes to product packaging, such as the bold blue and white for Clorox disinfecting wipes or the deep red of Tide bottles. But the colors are more than just eye-catching.

A new paper by University of Rhode Island researcher Lauren Labrecque, published in the Journal of Marketing has found that consumers use observable clues, like color, to help evaluate products.

Through her research, Labrecque, a marketing professor within URI’s College of Business, along with fellow URI marketing professor Christy Ashley, illustrates that consumers associate the saturation of color in a product’s packaging with the product’s efficacy.  

“Color Me Effective: The Impact of Color Saturation on Perceptions of Potency and Product Efficacy” shows that consumers subconsciously perceive products in highly saturated packaging, and the product itself, as more effective than those in lightly saturated packaging. The paper’s findings are based on multiple studies using participants from multiple cultures (USA, UK, Germany), involved in field, web, and in-person experiments.

According to the study, “this belief stems from learned associations between color saturation and potency and is applied to both consumable and durable products. Moreover, consumers overgeneralize this intuition beyond a product’s actual color to a product’s packaging color and the background color used in advertisements.”

The paper shows that consumers subconsciously perceive products in highly saturated packaging, and the product itself, as more effective than those in lightly saturated packaging.

The research shows that people think products and packaging with higher saturation are more effective than products with less saturation. Labrecque defines saturation as the purity of a hue, whereas hue is the color itself – red, orange, blue, green, and so on.  

In one experiment, consumers were given sample bottles of a clear household cleaner with varying levels of food coloring inside generic bottles. The cleaning liquid was the same in each bottle, only the color was different. They were instructed to clean a small portion of their desks using the different colored cleaners. Results showed that people used less of the heavily saturated cleaner, suggesting they believed it was more effective than the less saturated version. 

“What’s neat about that was that we included open-ended comments,” says Labrecque. “Many times, people say, ‘oh, it cleaned better’ or they would say, ‘the darker color made me think it was going to work better.’ Some even thought that the more saturated one smelled stronger, which illustrates color’s cross-modal effects – that is, when one sense affects another.”

Findings show that this perception extended beyond cleaning products to other consumer goods, including appliances and safety products. The same phenomenon happened when they did field testing.

Hand sanitizer stations were set up inside classrooms, with different bottles of sanitizer varying only in color being placed on different days. Consistent with the lab study, people used less of the heavily saturated hand sanitizer, indicating that even those unaware that they were part of a study thought the product with higher saturation worked better, she said. 

For companies, utilizing heavily saturated colors in products and packaging can be highly advantageous, but it’s a double-edged sword, Labrecque said. Companies selling sustainable or “green” products may find people using more of the product than necessary, since they tend to use less saturated colors. This undermines their sustainability goals. 

“We can reverse this effect by reminding consumers of the potency of a product on the packaging, how much is recommended, or that the dye doesn’t matter,” said Labrecque. “The dyes are just there to look pretty and are not functional at all.”