Display Red Prices to Men

What color should prices be?

Typically red, like this area:

Try a semi-saturated red that looks vivid, yet natural.

Stronger For

• Men. They assume that red indicates savings (Puccinelli et al., 2013, p. 121). But this effect has also been replicated with females and different cultures (Kim & Jang, 2022; Van Droogenbroeck et al., 2018)

Caveats

• Savings Can't Be Too Low. A red price worked for a 30% discount, but it decreased conversions for a 5% discount (Kim & Jang, 2022).
• All Prices Need to Be Red. Changing a single price in your assortment could backfire (Ye et al., 2020).
• Not Too Saturated. A saturated object looks bigger because attention is pulled toward it, and customers blame this heightened noticeability on its size: Well, it must be bigger (Hagtvedt & Brasel, 2017).

• Hagtvedt, H., & Brasel, S. A. (2017). Color saturation increases perceived product size. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(2), 396-413.
• Puccinelli, N. M., Chandrashekaran, R., Grewal, D., & Suri, R. (2013). Are men seduced by red? The effect of red versus black prices on price perceptions. Journal of Retailing, 89(2), 115-125.
• Kim, H., & Jang, J. M. (2022). Disadvantages of red: The color congruence effect in comparative price advertising. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1019163.
• Van Droogenbroeck, E., Van Hove, L., & Cordemans, S. (2018). Do red prices also work online?: An extension of Puccinelli et al.(2013). Color Research & Application, 43(1), 110- 113.
• Ye, H., Bhatt, S., Jeong, H., Zhang, J., & Suri, R. (2020). Red price? Red flag! Eye-tracking reveals how one red price can hurt a retailer. Psychology & Marketing, 37(7), 928-941.