Friday, August 09, 2013

New look for beer? Really?

This'll be copyright the very lovely Tring Brewery
You may have seen something about this recently: "It is believed that Tring is the first brewery in the UK to use applied colour psychology, and to recognise the importance of colour in influencing emotion, mood and behaviour. " Well, hardly. But we'll let that pass.
Here's some "genuine" colour psychology for you - actual research rather than the opinion of some hippy. (and I'm not branding the no doubt enormously talented folks at KM Design a bunch of hippies - Tring clips are their work)

You ask a giant load of people to tell you how strongly they associate given words with particular "emotions". At the same time, you ask them if they associate any colour with each word.  Do your stats and you can have a go at figuring out what colours they're associating with "angry" words, "sad" words etc.

Colour signature of emotive terms: percent of emotive terms associated with each colour. For example, 32.4% of the anger terms are associated with the colour red.
Source: Crowdsourcing the Creation of a Word–Emotion Association Lexicon
Saif M. Mohammad and Peter D. Turney
Computational Intelligence, Volume 59, Number 000, 2008
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~saif/WebDocs/TechRep-MohammadTurney-CI.pdf

It might be a bit of a leap (and my sincere apologies to the authors) to go on to wonder what this means for our marketing effort here in the happening world of beer. And this is only the opinion of some hippy (me).
I guess we wouldn't mind having our customers feel trust, anticipation and joy when they see our point of sale - so let's go for white and green - perhaps throw in blue and yellow.
Since we're not going for anger, sadness, disgust and fear, let's avoid black and red. So not much hope for Tring's "Colley's Dog" there.
Incidentally, brown seems to be a boring colour (with negative hints), doesn't it? I wonder what that means for the awesome world of beer.

Friday, August 02, 2013

On still having change for the tram home.

Of course, when I was a lad...etc.
Data here.

Tho' 2/3 of people believe that drinking out is too expensive...

And according to research by Mintel, £4.4bn a year less money is being spent in pubs now than five years ago -  around £80,000 per pub (even with 6,000 fewer pubs).
(As reported by PMA editor Rob Willock.)