Align Saturation With Distance

Should images be color or grayscale?

It depends. Ads for a charity event converted differently depending on its future date:

• In a few years? Grayscale ads converted better.
• In a few days? Color ads converted better.

And they replicated this effect with the launch of a hoverboard (Lee et al., 2017).

Why does it happen? Because we visualize future events in grayscale.

Researchers asked people to fill a blank drawing of a housewarming party with color. If this party was occurring in five years, people used more variations of grey because their mental imagery was less colorful (Lee et al., 2017). And fMRI studies confirmed this effect (Stillman et al., 2020).

Reduce Saturation For

• Future Purchases. Like a concert in a few months (vs. few days).
• Distant Receivers. Are customers buying gifts? Intensify color for close recipients like friends or family, and desaturate color for distant recipients like colleagues.
• Luxury Brands. Customers imagine luxury brands with more psychological distance, so they prefer these brands with more spatial distance — like standing further away. Same with grayscale images: A Tiffany watch seemed more luxurious in black-and-white because it felt further away (Wang et al., 2022; Chu et al., 2021).

Increase Saturation For

• Deadlines. Show your promotional expiration in a saturated red so that it feels closer in time.

Stronger For

• Active Imagination. This effect didn't manifest in brain patterns during passive viewing. It only happened when customers actively imagined these events (Stillman et al., 2020).

• Chu, X. Y., Chang, C. T., & Lee, A. Y. (2021). Values created from far and near: Influence of spatial distance on brand evaluation. Journal of Marketing, 85(6), 162-175.
• Lee, H., Fujita, K., Deng, X., & Unnava, H. R. (2017). The role of temporal distance on the color of future-directed imagery: A construal-level perspective. Journal of Consumer Research, 43(5), 707-725.
• Rathee, S., Taylor, C. R., & Gupta, A. (2024). The appeal of blurred imagery: Enhancing advertising and brand attitudes for luxury goods. Journal of Business Research, 182, 114795.
• Stillman, P., Lee, H., Deng, X., Unnava, H. R., & Fujita, K. (2020). Examining consumers’ sensory experiences with color: A consumer neuroscience approach. Psychology & Marketing, 37(7), 995-1007.
• Wang, Y., Wang, T., Mu, W., & Sun, Y. (2022). What is the glamor of black‐and‐white? The effect of color design on evaluations of luxury brand ads. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 21(5), 973-986.