Drinking with eyes: how colors elicit consumers’ taste expectations of coffee

Research on sensory marketing reveals that the interactions between sight and the other senses is particularly powerful. Specifically, this paper is focused on the role of colors and their impact in affecting consumers’ taste expectations towards coffee. The researchers, by considering some previous studies, have presented 4 visual stimuli (white cup, orange-reddish cup, cream colored cup and red cup) and 5 different flavors (aroma intensity, creaminess, degree of caffeine, sweetness, degree of temperature), in a lab experiment involving 300 participants. By applying an inferential analysis, conducted through the one-way between subjects ANOVA, we found that red is the most indicated to arouse pre-conceptions of the aroma intensity, caffeine-content and temperature. Implications and limits are further discussed.