The palette that stands out Color compositions of

Authors: Nima Y Jalali Purushottam Papatla

Publish Date: 2016/12/02

Volume: 14, Issue: 4, Pages: 353-384

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Abstract

Photos posted by consumers on social media like Instagram often include brands Despite the substantial increase in such photos there have been few investigations into how prospective consumers respond to this visual UGC We begin to address this gap by investigating the role of the color compositions of visual UGC in consumer response Consumer response is operationalized as the clickrate for a photo by a consumer when it is curated on the online site of the brand that it includes This is the proportion of visitors who click on it for an enlarged view Composition is operationalized as the specific combination of levels of the photo’s color attributes hue chroma and brightness Our goal is to identify the color compositions of photos ceteris paribus which get more clicks when they are curated Data for our investigation comes from clicks over a oneyear period on photos posted on Instagram curated by fifteen brands in six product categories on their sites We assume Beta distributed proportions and calibrate a Beta regression using MCMC methods for our investigationWe find that clickrates are higher for photos that include higher proportions of green and lower proportions of red and cyan We also find that chroma of red and blue are higher in photos with higher clickrates Findings from our research led the sponsoring firm to modify its proprietary curation algorithm for client brands The firm informed us that postmodification there has been a substantial increase in clickrates of curated photos for brands in several categoriesThe authors are grateful to Pradeep Chintagunta and Sanjog Misra for a very constructive and helpful review process They would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments They also express their gratitude to the agency’s founders for providing the data and being always readily available for discussions and clarifications during the research They also thank Lakshman Krishnamurthi Don Lehmann Puneet Manchanda Anita Rao and attendees of the Big Data Marketing Analytics Conference at the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center on October 31 2014 for comments during the early stages of this researchAdditional insights One advantage of the CobbDouglas formulation is that it permits us to include all the colors rather than relying on Violet as the base We therefore find that violet also has a positive effect on clickrates Additionally this specification indicates that the brightness of cyan has a small positive effect

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