The ketchup and mustard theory of advertising, AKA learning to taste your brand
What does your brand taste, smell, sound and feel like? Brands to Life's Paul Findlay explains the importance of evoking your customer's senses.
Ever driven past those golden arches and felt that undeniable urge for a burger, even though you’re not hungry, hungover or eighteen years old?
Next thing you’re ordering in the drive through, followed a forensic sweep of your car to get rid of any evidence.
You felt great, it was worth it for at least five seconds… but now you feel dirty… real dirty. Pull up a chair and take a deep, deep breath. You are not alone my friends!
Let’s start from the beginning and break this one down, so we can work out how some seemingly innocently branded signage can lead to such guilty indiscretions.
First, it’s good to understand that we generally make a decision within 90 seconds of being engaged with a brand, but one particular study conducted by the University of Winnipeg in Canada that I came across has expanded on this further and shown that up to 60-92% of this assessment is actually based on colour alone.
So there’s the first part of our sensory expedition… let’s explore the idea of colour having such a strong pull on our senses and while we’re at it get a little deep on the psychology of colour.
Red and yellow. Why are you so darn influential?
There are things about yellow and red that most of us already inherently know. Yellow inspires happiness and positivity and red gets you to stop and look (this makes sense as we practice this every day stopping at traffic lights). Red also stimulates and excites us, just like when we are ready to feast on something delicious, our heart rate picks up and neurons fire up in the hypothalamus part of the brain. This explains the stimulation you feel and dare I say it, the ‘fomo’ that hits your belly as your drive past the red and yellow signage.
But there’s another idea within food marketing that I think explains this enigma best. This idea also has a bit more meat to it (pun intended), to the point that you can actually taste it when it’s applied correctly – it’s what’s termed the mustard and ketchup theory.
The mustard and ketchup theory
Yes, that gloriously nostalgic, yellow and red zig-zag sauce combination that proudly lives on burgers and hotdogs. It not only plays on our minds as a tasty little colour hook, this visual also inspires our tastebuds as a memorable flavour hit. This simple and very stealthful, sensory trigger lures even the best of us helplessly towards the prize like a pack of fast food zombies heading eagerly towards a McBrain Burger.
But there is one more very important ingredient of this invisible sinister pie we need to understand before we wrap this up.
We eat with our eyes and ears
Yes, we eat with our eyes and science has shown us that colour plays an important part with the way we absorb and taste the flavour profiles in the things we eat.
Also keep in mind what the mustard predominately sits on is either a hotdog or a hamburger, both very soft and juicy sounding names – it’s a sensory thing, a sound and a visual showcase as much as it is taste. This theory would fall flat if there was a smattering of natural brown tomato sauce, alongside a drizzle of dirty green mustard.
After understanding the true power of these theories, the way colour, sound and form can play with our brains, there’s no secret as to why a lot of successful fast food chains have developed their brands, spaces, and signage with a good squirt of bright yellow and red magic in mind.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. This thinking can extend much broader than just fast food, we can use similar theories along with the support of visual languages and exciting sensory cues like sound and smell to further enhance our messaging and give a heightened brand experience to your customers. So what does your brand taste, smell, sound and feel like?
Paul Findlay is Brands to Life’s creative director.
“But one particular study conducted by the University of Winnipeg in Canada that I came across has expanded on this further and shown that up to 60-92% of this assessment is actually based on colour alone.”
No it didn’t. You cited a paper which… just said it. It wasn’t tested in the study and nothing was cited for that statistic. As far as anyone knows that’s completely made up.
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Hi AC,
I have the full pdf that is more thorough than the article, would be happy to pass this on, will need you to send me your email address.
Paul
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Hi Paul, is this not it? https://bit.ly/2D4YpG9 If that’s the full paper, you’ll notice neither the 90 second claim nor the 62-90% claim are sourced, tested, or even mentioned again outside of the abstract. In fact, the paper is riddled with unsourced claims.
Now, I personally can’t find a single reference to the 62-90% claim that predates the paper’s publication, though there are literally tens of thousands that appear in the years after. Maybe a source exists but the point is that there’s no evidence for it that anyone can see. Though you do have to admit it sounds like an unbelievably high number with a bizarrely wide range. How would one even measure that and put it down to a percentage? What’s the rest of our assessment based on? A little critical thinking and academic literacy would do us good if we’re pretending to be behavioural scientists I think.
To that note, one claim in the paper that happens to be sourced is that “the evidence linking specific colors to specific responses is inconclusive (Kaiser, 1984).”
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