Keywords

1 Color Emotion Design in Leisure Food Package

Today, people’s daily life is intertwined with leisure food. Increasing income and better living quality add to requirements on the forms of food packages. In addition to meeting basic packing requirements, package should also be funny, interactive and agreeable. In other words, it should meet consumers’ emotional demands. Color design is the major visual language for package, and sets the keynote for the emotional design of leisure food package. As indicated by statistical data of psychology, people are more easily to resonate with and pay visual attention to colors of package, rather than its shape, pattern, and structure [1]. Kansei image, mental preference and emotional demand for package color deliver a number of benefits: adding to the emotional resonance that consumers have for food package, stirring up consumers’ desire to buy, thus promoting food sales, and shaping and communicating the brand image for the leisure food.

“Color can reflect human emotions faithfully, and this is an irrefutable fact,” said American educator Rudolf Arnheim [2]. Color is more than just visual perception of objective things, but also emotional expression of people’s subjective awareness. Color emotion is actually a kind of psychological state generated by associating the color information received by people’s visual organs and transmitted by optic nerve with past memories, lives and personal experience. It can be perceived and obtained by any people with normal vision and common sense.

When buying leisure food, consumers normally measure three criteria: food attribute, brand scale, and price, which are all closely related to package color. In global design competitions like Pentawards and iF, the majority of outstanding package designs give priority to visual color (as shown in Fig. 1). For modern enterprises, reasonable color matching for food package is necessary for successful marketing. When selecting leisure food, consumers are first attracted visually by colors; after confirming the basic information about food, consumers would choose to pay based on their own preferences and brand awareness. Correspondingly, color design is meant to improve the emotional experience of consumers in buying and add to the correlation between satisfaction for package color and consumers’ emotional demand. In that, color design can drive a positive cycle of food buying.

Fig. 1.
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Outstanding leisure food package designs from Pentawards and iF (Color figure online)

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2 Research on Relation Between Leisure Food Package and Color Emotional Semantics

Color semantic can best reflect the expression of people’s mental feelings and emotional effects. By nature, color semantics describe in words the connotative meaning of color expression using textualism [3]. It mainly studies the physical sensory stimulation generated by color vision and experiential psychological association. This experiment aims to analyze and conclude the potential relation between theme colors for leisure food package and consumers’ color emotional semantics, and to prove the factual correlation between them. There are mainly three phases: 1. Gaining leisure food package theme colors preferred by consumers; 2. Testing and integration of emotional semantics for leisure food package colors; and 3. Correlation analysis of leisure food package colors and color emotional semantics. Specific procedures are shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.
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Experiment flowchart

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Considering the frequent buying groups of leisure food and the difference in semantic cognition of color emotions, a total of 30 college students and teaching and administrative staff from a college in Nanjing Xuanwu District are selected for the experiment. They are all good in physical conditions, and free from any visual exceptions. Men and women are divided by 50/50, with age distribution: 40% for 18–21; 40% for 22–25; 15% for 26–30; and 5% for 31–35. Screening for participants guarantees that they have common recognition for the semantic expressions of package colors, thus ensuring that color information transmitted by leisure food package is correct.

Spearman Rank Correlation from socioeconomic statistics is adopted for studying the relationship between young consumers’ color satisfaction for leisure food package and recognition for color emotional semantics. Spearman’s correlation coefficient for ranked data is used to assess the correlation between two variables X and Y, and their correlation can be expressed by monotone function [4]. Spearman Rank Correlation has wide application, and requires less on data compared to that of coefficient of production-moment correlation. As long as the observation thresholds of two variables are pairing, they can be analyzed by Spearman Rank Correlation irrespective of distribution pattern and sample size.

2.1 Obtaining Consumer Preferences for Package Colors

Following Munsell Color System, quantitative color data is used to build HSV package theme color database for the initial phase. The database includes color numbers and all attributes. Based on three attributes of each color, they are combined to present matching package colors [5]. The Munsell Color System presents Hue (H), Saturation (S) and Value (V) for each color. These three basic attributes have different value ranges, with 0–360 for H, 0–100 for S, and 0–100 for V.

Where, x, y, and z correspond to H, S, V respectively, thus the value ranges are 0 ≤ x ≤ 360; 0 ≤ y ≤ 100; 0 ≤ z ≤ 100. In consideration of the actual operability and color vision features of participants, the three attributes are valued by segment, specifically: 10 segments for H: 0, 36, 72, 108, 144, 180, 216, 252, 288, 324; 5 for S: 20, 40, 60, 80, 100; and 5 for V: 20, 40, 60, 80, 100. Due to the fact that achromatic packages are not covered in the experiment, the achromatic part (0–20) for S and V is eliminated; while segments 324–360 and 0–36 of H show the same color, and are therefore eliminated. This means that there are totally 250 (10 * 5 * 5) theme colors of leisure food package generated by the color database, and some of the colors and their attributes are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Part of package theme color and their attributes
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A total of 30 young people are invited to select from 250 theme colors for leisure food package. For easy observation and selection, the 250 original colors are grouped into 10, with 25 colors for each group. The experiment is totally done on PC, and visual colors corresponding to the color values from the database are extracted from Adobe Photoshop. In other words, 250 HSV colors are converted into RGB colors, and color cards are made on PC, enabling participants to quickly and accurately select package theme colors they prefer (as shown in Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.
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Part of leisure food package color cards and participant select preferred package color (Color figure online)

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Food package colors are the target in this experiment, and package colors belong to spray paint. Therefore, formula (1) is used to convert RGB colors obtained into CMYK colors to guarantee color recognition and effectiveness.

$$ ( \text{C, M, Y, K)} = \left\{\begin{array}{c} {{\rm K} = 0} \\{{\rm C} = 100{\text{-R}}{}^*100{/}255} \\ {{\rm M} = 100{\text{-G}}{}^*100{/}255} \\ {{\rm Y} = 100{\text{-B}}{}^*100{/}255} \end{array} \right. $$
(1)

The visual preference experiment delivers theme colors samples preferred by 30 participants, and these samples in each group are ranked by the number of participants preferred such colors in descending order. There are totally 10 tables. Two groups of theme colors favored by most participants are selected, and thus 20 colors (10 for each group) are confirmed for the experiment. The participants are invited to rate the 20 theme colors in “1–5”, corresponding to “Dissatisfied - Satisfied”. After computation, the satisfaction scores for the 20 themes colors by 30 participants are obtained, and then the averages are calculated for the final ranking of color satisfaction scores in descending orders. Figure 4 shows the 10 leisure food package theme colors obtained, and these samples would be used in phase 3.

Fig. 4.
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Top 10 leisure food package theme colors by satisfaction score (Color figure online)

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2.2 Kansei Comments for Color Emotional Semantics

A combination of literature theory method, questionnaire and interview is used to screen semantic vocabulary for color emotions by participants. Out of 30 questionnaires issued to respondents, 22 valid questionnaires are obtained, and the rest 8 questionnaires are invalid. A principle of “the majority” is used. In details, only semantic words mentioned in at least 50% of questionnaires would be selected as the final samples of color emotional semantics. There are 22 valid questionnaires, and semantic words selected less than 11 times would be eliminated. In that, 10 words are rejected. After data code formatting, 12 semantic words are obtained with respect to theme colors (Table 2).

Table 2. List of semantics words for leisure food package theme colors
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In a relatively stable environment, 30 participants are required to select by visual preference from 10 groups of theme colors obtained in phase I on mobile PC. And they would rate the 12 semantic words by satisfaction. Image scale in Kansei engineering is adopted, and Likert scale is used to build satisfaction scale. Scoring measures for semantic word recognition are the same as those in Phase I. With the top 10 theme colors by satisfaction score, we can get the satisfaction scores for each group from C1 to C10 and for 12 semantic words.

2.3 Spearman Rank Correlation

If the significance for the correlation coefficient on statistical is less than 0.05, i.e. p < 0.05, there is significant correlation between recognition of semantic words and satisfaction for theme color; if p < 0.0.1, such correlation is highly significant; and if p > 0.05, there is no significant correlation between the two. In this phase, satisfaction scores for 10 theme colors and recognition scores for 12 semantic words are analyzed for Spearman’s correlation coefficient for ranked data. The correlation coefficients between each color satisfaction and all 12 semantic words are calculated, shown in Table 3. (Only part of SPSS statistical data is presented due to limited space.)

Table 3. List of correlation coefficients between theme color satisfaction and semantic recognition
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2.4 Data Analysis and Results Discussion

After analyzing the correlation for the 10 groups, the correlations between theme colors of C1–C10 and color semantics of V1–V15 are shown in Table 4. Data indicate that correlation coefficients between color satisfaction and semantic recognition differ for the 10 groups (C1–C10). Take C1 for example, V2 (passionate) and V11 and (excited) have the highest correlation with the color satisfaction. Correlation coefficient for V2 is 0.896, and significance is 0.006; while that for V11 is 0.816 and 0.025 respectively. Since 0.006 < 0.025, V2 has a higher correlation to C1 theme colors compared to V11.

Table 4. List of correlation between theme color satisfaction and semantics words
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In this color experiment, 8 of all 10 groups show significant correlation by Spearman’s correlation coefficient for ranked data, and all of them are positive. V1 and V10 have the highest correlation coefficients with 10 theme colors. Correlation data obtained indicates that there is positive correlation between theme color satisfaction for leisure food package and emotional semantic recognition. The higher the recognition for the color semantic, the higher the satisfaction for the theme color. This also implies a close inner connection between package colors and color emotional semantics.

3 Conclusion

In face of fierce market competition, leisure food can only arouse consumers’ emotional appeal if the package color can accurately reflect good information [6]. This thesis screens theme colors for leisure food package and confirms matching color semantics. Through mathematical analysis, the factual correction is explored between color emotional semantics and package colors. Research into the relation between leisure food package color and color emotional semantics can offer beneficial guidance in the color emotional design of leisure food package. By using such potential connection in a reasonable way, designers can more accurately obtain the color demands of consumers and gain a deeper understanding of consumers’ color preference. Guided by color emotional semantics, color emotional design for leisure food package offers a number of benefits: adding to consumers’ awareness for perceptive consumption and emotional resonance for package color; enabling emotional interaction between consumers and product packages, and creating spiritual experience for consumers.