Chocolate, Colour and Consideration: An Exploratory Study of Consumer Response to Packaging Variation in the South African Confectionery Sector

Color has become increasingly influential as marketers seek to unlock the potential this factor has on behavioural decisions, in part due to colour being the first product attribute a consumer’s brain registers when looking at a product. However, minimal academic research has been undertaken to investigate this function in an emerging market context. This exploratory study sets out to examine how thecolourof packaging of chocolate products affects consumers ’ purchase intent, both in terms of spontaneous response and brand loyalty. A consumer survey was conducted through a mall-intercept approach using a sample of 161 respondents. The Friedman and Mann Whitney U tests were conducted in order to compute the data generated within this study. The research concludes that colour holds the potential to influence a consumer’s purchase behaviour of chocolate, with purple far more influential than orange, for example. Moreover, this effect was found to be consistent across low and high income groups. The results underscore the importance of colour and suggest marketers and retailers would be well advised to consider the associations between packaging colour and consumer response