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.