Miller, Elizabeth G, and Barbara E. Kahn.

"Shades of Meaning: the Effect of Color and

Flavor Names on Consumer Choice." Journal of Consumer Research. 32.1 (2005).
Print.
Elizabeth G. Miller is an assistant professor of Marketing at Boston College and Barbara
E. Kahn is the Dorothy Silberberg Professor of Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania. The
peer reviewed article was published in 2005. Miller and Kahn conducted a research that shows
consumers are more likely to buy items with unusual names and colors because consumers
automatically expect marketing to give all the needed information. The data was collected using
comments from 60 undergraduate participants at Singapore Management University and research
from other scholarly sources. The intended audience for the research is for mostly people in
marketing. The research was based off of Grices theory of Conversational implicature. The
rhetorical situation is that color does not have a full effect on people that people might think
when it comes to buying products, the name does. The color of products do have a big influence
on catching the attention of consumers. One of the examples used in the research was a 64 pack
of crayons versus a 24 pack of crayons. Consumers are more likely to buy the 64 box over the 24
box, not because of the increase in numbers, because of the unique names on the crayons. The
different colors catch the attention of consumers but what this research shows is that consumers
value a lot on the visualization that comes with the name. Theres an increase possibility that
consumers will buy a product without a picture over the product with the picture. The reason
being is because of the research the consumer would have to do in order to compare the color
with something reliable. Cognitively our brain will pick the product that you put the most
research in. This experiment emphasize that people make judgments by evaluating new
encounters against existing expectations.

characteristics of the name may drive how people process them,

viewing the picture first significantly reduced satisfaction for the ambiguous names, but

not for any of the other name types

If the message is not informative (as is the case for the ambiguous names) or does not
conform to expectations (as is the case for unexpected descriptive names), consumers
search for the reason for the deviation

The text was easy to read as a whole but there were some points in my reading where I got a
little lost. This resource can be applicable to my inquiry question but I am not sure how useful it
will be. The research was talking more about unique names of colors and not the color itself.
Although it talks more about the names I can use it when talking about advertising with color. It
shows that not only does the color mean a lot in advertising but also the name of products.