Issue #0515/2 - Using colour is vital in all forms of visual communication. Oki has undertaken scientific studies to help customers maximise the effectiveness of their materials.
Oki, second largest manufacturer of colour printers, has picked up the importance of colour baton from where it was left abandoned by Tektronix when the company was purchased by Xerox.
For years, the Tektronix printer company based the majority of its marketing activity around the importance of colour message. Regular seminars educated business users in the importance of colour and guided them in its usage. Partly as a result of this activity, Tektronix became one of the foremost players in the colour printer market, making the company a perfect target for purchase by Xerox.
Many other companies have shown an interest in colour and its usage but more from the marketing perspective to help them understand where their clients are placed in terms if colour usage.
For Oki, however, the interest is said to be the result of discussions within the company that has revealed a general lack of understanding of the value and use of colour, especially amongst small and medium sized enterprises.
In order to address the issue, Oki has been showing a scientific interest in the psychology of colour as a means of, again, educating users in the use of colour. Many of us remember some of the awful page designs that appeared (and still do) as a result of opening up DeskTop Publishing to the masses in the mid-1980s. The same is true of the use of colour – a fact that many home-made web sites bear witness to.
Both approaches by manufacturers are, naturally, aimed at winning new customers by proving that they understand more than how to build a colour printer. A vast amount of colour science goes into the design and manufacture of a colour printer. In fact, it is the colour tables (the mathematical lookup tables that tell the printer exactly what colour mix to print for each and every pixel) that are the last element of the design to be finalised during the prototyping process.
Employing world-renowned colour psychologist, Angela Wright, and working closely with the Colour & Imaging Institute, University of Derby, Oki has been involved in scientific studies to analyse the human response to colour.
That may be an extreme example but nature’s colours on a bright and sunny day are guaranteed to bring a sense of calm and well-being, while the coloured lighting used in a disco or club is designed to wind people up into an excited and energised frenzy.
So, at a basic level, the study looked at how colour affects our moods and behaviour and why we may have a different response from another person to the same colour. Digging deeper, the study also investigated the differences caused by use of varying hues and shades within the colour spectrum and whether there are any universally attractive colours.
Oki’s goal in this latest academic involvement with colour is to help guide businesses with regard to customers’ responses to corporate colour schemes and to help them design more effective marketing, publicity and communication materials.
Customers are told that they should decide on the colour scheme early in the design process with clear focus on the brand values they wish to communicate and what they are trying to accomplish through their communication.
As an example Angela Wright quotes the use of a splash of green as being effective in attracting the eye. However, if used inappropriately, the green can portray a message of stagnancy and blandness, which she says can make a customer think of lack of action.
So, part of the design process involves the selection of colours that “best reflect their brand”. Looking at the colour scheme used in the new Oki web site, one wonders if the results of the study have been passed to its own design team, with guidance on how to use colour! At a personal level, I think the colours used in the new Oki web site send me a ‘muddy’, ‘uncoordinated’ message implying that the company lacks clarity and definition.
In practical terms, Oki has used this research to develop software tools (provided with the printers) that are designed to help users with the use and management of colour in their documents. The hope is that Oki customers will be able to produce materials that comply with research from Pennsylvania College of Optometry, which says that “using colour makes people twice as likely to notice your communications. It increases message understanding and retention by 78 per cent and encourages readers to take action by some 85 per cent”.
To add a specific Cost of Printing comment, to emphasise the relevance of the work Oki is doing, marketing communications have to be effective to be worth doing. If the communication is ineffective due to misguided use of colour, the concept and design time, together with the cost of inks/toner, media and production time, are all wasted – resulting in lost potential and well as wasted resources.
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