Feeling Faded: How Social Exclusion Experience Shapes Consumers' Preference for Color Saturation

Hongliang Liu; Bin Zheng; Yongjie Wang

doi:10.54691/pt5g7j12

Authors

Hongliang Liu School of Management, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China
Bin Zheng School of Management, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China
Yongjie Wang School of Management, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54691/pt5g7j12

Keywords:

Social Exclusion; Color Saturation; Perceived Vitality; Sensory Compensation; Visual Marketing.

Abstract

Saturation is among the most basic properties of a product's color, and on a supermarket shelf it varies far more than hue or lightness does. What is less clear is why a consumer in a given social-psychological state would come to want it. Working from a social-interaction perspective, we propose that social exclusion experience lowers perceived vitality, the felt sense of being alive, energetic, and substantial, and that consumers who have been excluded compensate by reaching for highly saturated products, because saturation is the visual dimension on which living things register their condition. Five experiments (total N = 2,677) test the account. Excluded consumers chose high-saturation products more often than included consumers did and paid more for them (Study 1). The effect did not depend on visual density and ran through perceived vitality rather than arousal, positive affect, belonging, control, meaning, or death-thought accessibility (Study 2). Handing vitality back removed the effect, and making vitality salient strengthened it (Study 3). The effect was larger after being ignored than after being rejected (Study 4), and it disappeared once the product was positioned as natural or authentic (Study 5). The findings move sensory compensation from a question of how much to a question of what kind, and they locate a condition under which a single visual cue carries two conflicting meanings.

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