Guilty Red Food Packages: How the Color Red Affects Guilt through Negative Cognitive Associations for Vice Products: An Abstract

Food companies frequently use color as a tool for easy identification, with for instance Coca-Cola being associated with the color red. Previous research supports this notion of colors as a powerful cue, colors being showed to influence emotional responses (Babin et al. 2003; Bellizzi and Hite 1992), but also brand evaluation (Labrecque and Milne 2012), price perception (Babin et al. 2003; Puccinelli et al. 2013), and purchase intentions (Gorn et al. 1997; Labrecque and Milne 2012). Given this role of cognitions following color exposure, it may be that cognitive inferences explain the mixed evidence found for one particular color: red. This color often carries positive meanings, as it is associated with love or energy, but also negative ones, priming, for example, the notions of danger, mistakes, ban, transgression, or war (Elliot et al. 2007). Surprisingly, however, no research to date has examined how the negative associations induced by the color red might negatively affect emotions and behavior. Therefore, the current research relies on recent studies highlighting the aforementioned importance of color for food products to examine the effect of the color red on consumers' responses to food packages. Specifically, because of its negative meanings and specifically its association with mistakes (Mehta and Zhu 2009), the color red may prompt negative feelings that are closely linked to transgression, more specifically guilt, an emotion that results from the transgression of moral or social standards (Baumeister et al. 1994). To test this notion, this research builds on the S-O-R model and psychological literature on guilt to posit hypotheses about the relationship among red, negative cognitive associations, and guilt. The research tests the hypotheses in a series of three studies. Because of the historical opposition between red and green (Nakshian 1964), A first study using chip packages as stimuli demonstrates the indirect effect of the color red (vs. green) on guilt through the mediating role of negative cognitive associations. Then, two additional studies using candies and cereal bar packages, respectively, replicate these effects and also demonstrate the role of the vice versus virtue product type. The results highlight the moderating role of perception of the product as a vice product, with the color red leading to stronger negative associations and guilt for such products. Implications for further research are discussed. \textcopyright 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.