Gorilla, Prolific and CX Lab logos

Color, and the per­cep­tion of certain colors, plays a huge role in busi­ness. Cor­po­ra­tions spend bil­lions of dollars each year choos­ing the right colors for their logos, mar­ket­ing, and store design. The goal? To entice or influ­ence cus­tomers to buy their prod­ucts or services.

 

📔The task

CX Lab designed a study for a retail opti­cian group who were looking to rebrand their stores to increase their market share. They wanted to better under­stand how certain colors influ­ence peo­ple’s per­cep­tion of a brand. Specif­i­cal­ly, if color influ­enced their first choice pref­er­ence of store and per­cep­tion of value for money.

CX Lab set out to answer the fol­low­ing ques­tions. How does color influ­ence human behav­ior in the com­mer­cial world? And how might a better under­stand­ing of this improve com­mer­cial results for businesses?

Tim Rout­lege, CEO of CX Lab, gave a fan­tas­tic talk at the BeOn­line Con­fer­ence about this. If you’d rather sit back and watch instead of reading, feel free to do so:

 

🎯The chal­lenge

People often can’t explain or ratio­nal­ize why they feel a certain way. Asking par­tic­i­pants ques­tions about things has proven to be a poor way of getting the truth. Not because they’re being delib­er­ate­ly dif­fi­cult. They’re just not always aware of the uncon­scious drivers or asso­ci­a­tions for their behavior.

CX Lab needed par­tic­i­pants to respond with their actions, rather than their words. But this meant those par­tic­i­pants had to be fully engaged through­out the study to achieve the highest data quality.

They needed to create an inter­ac­tive, real-time behavioral experiment at scale, while also retain­ing high data quality and exten­sive fil­ter­ing capacities.

 

💡The solu­tion

CX Lab wanted to monitor peo­ple’s behav­ior rather than direct­ly asking them ques­tions. So, they decided to use Gorilla and Pro­lif­ic to carry out this study.

They used Goril­la’s online behavioral plat­form to design a multi-stage experiment. Par­tic­i­pants were shown 3 store fronts (one being the clien­t’s store) with dif­fer­ent colors in a virtual shop­ping mall envi­ron­ment. They had to pick their pref­er­ence and a second choice based on the appear­ance of the stores alone.

Gorilla handled both the com­plex­i­ty and size of this experiment design easily and also offered expert opin­ions from people who com­plete­ly under­stand smart exper­i­men­ta­tion. Using Gorilla to build the experiment was fast. From initial brief to the pre­sen­ta­tion of the results, the whole process took just over three weeks.

[Gorilla] turns com­pli­cat­ed hypothe­ses into sep­a­rate parts, allow­ing you to test each of them in a struc­tured way”

“I don’t know of another plat­form that is like [Gorilla], that’s why we keep coming back.”

Tim Rout­ledge — Co-Founder, CX Lab

CX Lab also inte­grat­ed Gorilla with Pro­lif­ic to recruit par­tic­i­pants. CX Lab recruit­ed 1,200 people from the Pro­lif­ic plat­form, fil­ter­ing for a bal­anced mix of demo­graph­ics. Using Pro­lific’s custom fil­ter­ing tool, they ran initial screen­ing studies for people with cor­rect­ed vision. Then they used suc­cess­ful par­tic­i­pants for the full-scale research.

“[Pro­lific’s] adapt­abil­i­ty, flex­i­bil­i­ty, and sim­plic­i­ty makes it the go-to place for us.”

“[With Pro­lif­ic] it isn’t just press a button and you’ll get a stan­dard set of people. […] We were able to con­struct our own sam­pling brief. It was very easy and straightforward.”

Tim Rout­ledge — Co-Founder, CX Lab

CX Lab chose to work with both Pro­lif­ic and Gorilla based on their seam­less inte­gra­tion, rig­or­ous data quality, and how easy they were to work with. Pro­lif­ic pro­vid­ed quick access to engaged, atten­tive par­tic­i­pants. Gorilla made the life-like envi­ron­ment for smart exper­i­men­ta­tion pos­si­ble — and straight­for­ward. Com­bined, these plat­forms enabled the highest quality data to be fed back to the client.

In-person studies would be far too expen­sive and slow for clients. Pro­lif­ic and Gorilla allowed CX Lab to extract rapid, high-quality data quickly and easily.

“[Pro­lif­ic and Gorilla] have become an essen­tial tool as part of our process […] it helps you to think much bigger. We now think about research­ing at a far larger scale, we can test for expe­ri­en­tial trip­ping points with mass numbers of people in a smart experiment which is as close to reality as we can get it.”

Tim Rout­ledge — Co-Founder, CX Lab

 

🔍The results

CX Lab found that color had a sig­nif­i­cant impact on what people expect­ed to pay. Par­tic­i­pants fre­quent­ly demon­strat­ed dif­fer­en­tial respons­es to which colors offered the best value for money.

One color came out on top: purple. 30% of par­tic­i­pants pre­ferred this color scheme. Post-study research sug­gest­ed this color felt both pro­fes­sion­al and relaxing.

More in-depth results were trick­i­er to deter­mine as this research was part of a period of con­sid­er­able change. Having said that, this research con­tributed to increased salien­cy on the high­street, in adver­tis­ing, and the brand’s overall image.

The retail opti­cian group now knows that their brand­ing has a spe­cif­ic iden­ti­ty that res­onates and is rec­og­niz­able to the public. Finally, this research, along with other brand changes, had a pos­i­tive impact on dif­fi­cult KPls in a noto­ri­ous­ly com­pet­i­tive industry.

By inte­grat­ing Pro­lif­ic and Gorilla, CX Lab could break down a large and complex hypoth­e­sis into man­age­able sec­tions. These plat­forms enable any busi­ness to carry out this kind of rapid qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive mix of experimentation.

And with large, robust sample sizes, those busi­ness­es can get the quality data they need to back up better com­mer­cial deci­sions with confidence.

To read more about CX Lab’s work, visit their col­lec­tion of case studies. Or learn more about how Gorilla can help behavioral researchers gen­er­ate better data and insights and get more repeat­able, scal­able, enjoy­able, and prof­itable business.