How Color Affects the Effectiveness of Taste- versus Health-Focused Restaurant Advertising Messages

Despite the ubiquitous use of taste-focused and health-focused advertising messages, the existing advertising literature offers little guidance on how the persuasiveness of such messages might be enhanced through design elements such as color. To address this gap, the current research examines the new congruency of a visual design element (i.e., color) and a verbal design element (i.e., message type) and explores how color may facilitate the persuasion of taste-focused versus health-focused advertising messages. The message–color congruency effect is examined across two studies with between-subjects experimental designs utilizing an Amazon's Mechanical Turk (Mturk) consumer panel. The findings suggest that taste-focused advertising messages combined with color imagery and health-focused advertising messages combined with black-and-white (BW) imagery can effectively boost consumer responses, including attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the restaurant, purchase intention, and willingness to pay (WTP). Furthermore, mediation analyses demonstrate that the proposed message–color congruency effect is driven by consumers’ subjective experience of “feeling right” during information processing. Implications for designing advertisements are discussed.