Impact of Snack Packaging Colour on Perceptions of Healthiness and Tastiness

Packaging colour plays a crucial role in consumer communication and significantly influences purchase decisions. In snack food marketing, colour affects perceived healthiness and taste expectations. Consumers often rely on peripheral cues and have limited attention spans when selecting snacks. Understanding the relationship between packaging colour and consumer perception helps marketers communicate effectively and promotes healthier choices. This quantitative study, featuring 2,036 observations, tested perceptions of blue, green, red and yellow packaging colours using the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986) as the conceptual framework. The results indicate that packaging colour significantly impacts perceptions of healthiness and tastiness. Blue and green are associated with higher healthiness perceptions among individuals with high restrained eating behaviours, while red and yellow enhance tastiness perceptions for those with high external eating behaviours. The study also reveals that packaging colour mediates the relationship between healthiness and tastiness perceptions. In addition, different eating behaviours also affect purchase decisions, and perception of healthiness has a significant positive relationship with purchase decisions. This study contributes to the existing literature on packaging colour, its influence on purchase behaviour in the Hong Kong context and provides insights for marketers to better understand consumer preferences and inform their marketing strategies.