The Colour That Sold a Billion Cans

From the reading: The Colour That Sold a Billion Cans

In 1971, Coca-Cola aired a television advertisement showing young people on a hillside in Italy, each holding a bottle and singing to strangers. The imagery was warm, the message simple, the palette overwhelmingly red. Within weeks, sales climbed in every market where the ad ran. Decades later, neuroscientists studying consumer behaviour confirmed what Coca-Cola's designers had understood intuitively: red accelerates the heart rate, sharpens attention, and creates a subtle but measurable sense of urgency. The company had not chosen red arbitrarily. It had, over generations, hardwired an emotion into a can.