Blue for creativity

Posted on Friday, Feb 13, 2009 by Bryan McCall

Red and orange make you hungry, or so conventional marketing wisdom says. But a new study says that red also encourages you to pay more attention to detail, while blue makes you more creative. The study by Ravi Mehta and Rui (Juliet) Zhu published in Science is based on volunteers performing a variety of computer-based tasks while the background color on a computer screen was varied. Blue backgrounds resulted in better performance on creative tasks, while red lead to better performance on tasks that required attention to detail—such as proofreading a list of addresses.

We're not sure how we can use this in marketing, but maybe we should paint our offices blue.