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Introduction
The fractured nature of consumption, in which an increasing number of entities compete for consumer attention, poses key challenges for consumers. To help with these challenges, consumers are known to rely on visual cues, which may serve as subliminal stimuli that influence their purchasing processes (Clement, 2007; van der Laan et al. , 2015; Orth et al. , 2010). While consumers also use the other senses of hearing, smell, touch and taste (Krishna, 2012), the centrality of sight has been made clear: it is "[t]he most active, the most varied, and the most useful of all the bodily senses" (Parker, 1836, p. 216).
The benefit of visual cues is that they can be processed quickly and that vision itself requires minimal mental effort, meaning that sight is the most important sensory channel (Kauppinen-Räisänen, 2014; Krishna, 2012). Once light enters the eye and forms an image on the retina, a sensation is formed and the brain analyses this information further to form perceptions, which "[g]ive a meaning by past experience" (Hergenhahn and Henley, 2013). Sensation refers to a largely passive process in which taking in aspects of the surrounding environment may occur unconsciously but still affect behaviour. A subsequent perception may even be incomplete. Yet as stored in memory, meanings are created through the lens of cognitive associative learning (Grossman and Wisenblit, 1999; Martindale, 1991). Fundamentally, visual cues evoke sensation before they affect perception, while perception captures consumers' understanding of sensory information (Krishna, 2012). In doing so, past experiences facilitate the process of understanding and using to visual cues. Consumer research recognises this phenomenon and maintains that visual attention is a prerequisite for information processing, affecting emotional and/or cognitive perceptions (Kauppinen-Räisänen, 2014; Levy-Leblond, 2010). Therefore, colour has been lauded for its ability to not only attract but also retain attention (Schoormans and Robben, 1997), which enables further information processing.
Although scientific research has stressed the role of visual cues, it remains a neglected research area in marketing (Kauppinen-Räisänen, 2014; Orth et al. , 2010), although Krishna (2012) does note that a growing number of consumer studies pertain to behavioural interactions with sensations, including those derived from visual cues.
This study focuses on colour as a visual cue and more specifically a means of affecting cognitive...