Short answer
Yes, but only relative to its neighbours. Visual search is driven by contrast — in colour, lightness and edges — against the surrounding packs, combined with what the shopper is already looking for. The popular claim that most of a snap judgement is based on colour alone traces to a figure in a 2006 literature review, not to a controlled experiment, and should not be relied on.
The eye is drawn to what differs from its surroundings. A pack is salient when its colour, lightness or edge pattern stands out from the packs beside it, so the same red that shouts in a blue category vanishes in a red one. Van der Lans, Pieters and Wedel modelled shelf salience from exactly these perceptual features — colour, luminance and edges — in an eye-tracking brand-search study. The model also included the shopper's search goal: a brand people are looking for becomes easier to find, because the visual system weights the features it expects. In their data, about two-thirds of a brand's salience on the shelf came from in-store factors including pack design, and about one-third from out-of-store marketing that had taught shoppers what to look for.
Distinctiveness and familiarity work together. A colour that differs from the category makes a pack pop out; a colour the shopper has learned to associate with the brand or the variant makes it faster to confirm. The flavour-search experiments by Velasco and colleagues show the second half of this: a matching colour speeded search, a clashing one slowed it. The review by Spence and Velasco puts attention-capture first among packaging colour's roles. Put together, the best-supported advice is modest: be different from the neighbours in lightness as well as hue, and stay consistent long enough for shoppers to learn the colour.
Lightness contrast survives more conditions than hue contrast: dim aisles, glare on film, and red–green colour vision deficiency all erode hue differences first.
Marketing articles often say that people judge a product within 90 seconds and that 62–90% of that judgement is based on colour. The figure appears in the abstract of Satyendra Singh's 2006 paper 'Impact of color on marketing' in Management Decision — a literature review that reports no experiment of its own. Colourwise could not trace the percentage to a published controlled study with a stated method, sample and definition of 'assessment'. The claim is also hard to make meaningful: colour cannot be separated from the shape, text and imagery it is printed as, and a percentage of a judgement is not a quantity any known experiment measures. It is best treated as folklore, not as evidence.
Shelf visibility is judged under real store conditions, not on a monitor. Retail lighting varies in colour temperature and colour rendering between stores and even between fixtures; chiller cabinets add their own lighting and condensation; shrink film and gloss laminates throw highlights that wash out colour at some angles. A pack that pops on a calibrated screen can lose its advantage when its competitors' colours sit closer under the store's light. Checking against photographs of the real fixture, at shopping distance and under store light, is the only reliable test.
Why: Several competitors use similarly saturated colours, so the pack's colour contrast with its neighbours is small.
Fix: Compare against the neighbours in lightness: a much lighter or much darker pack separates even among bright colours.
Why: It was judged on a wide-gamut, bright monitor; printed and viewed under store light its colour sits closer to competitors.
Fix: Review printed proofs in a photograph or mock-up of the actual fixture under store-type lighting.
Each statement is labelled by kind — established fact, a standard’s requirement, observed market data, a convention, or Colourwise’s own interpretation or analysis — with the strength of the evidence behind it.
FactModerate evidence
In an eye-tracking brand-search study, shelf salience was modelled from colour, luminance and edges together with shoppers' search goals, and about two-thirds of brand salience was attributed to in-store factors including pack design and about one-third to out-of-store marketing.
Caveat: One study and one set of product categories; the split depends on the brands and advertising involved.
Source: Competitive Brand Salience (van der Lans, Pieters & Wedel, Marketing Science 27, 922–931, 2008)
FactStrong evidence
The widely repeated claim that 62–90% of a snap judgement about a product is based on colour alone appears in the abstract of a 2006 literature review, which reports no experiment of its own.
Caveat: This establishes where the figure was published, not that it is true.
Source: Impact of color on marketing (Singh, Management Decision 44, 783–789, 2006)
Colourwise interpretationModerate evidence
The '62–90% of judgements are based on colour' figure should be treated as marketing folklore: Colourwise could not trace it to a controlled study with a stated method, and colour cannot be isolated from the shape, words and images it appears in.
Based on: Colourwise's examination of the published origin of the figure (Singh 2006, a literature review) and the absence of a traceable primary experiment.
FactModerate evidence
Capturing shoppers' attention in store is one of the main roles packaging colour plays, alongside signalling product properties and acting as a brand asset.
Reviewed 29 September 2026. Colourwise summarises its sources in its own words and does not reproduce standards text or proprietary colour data. Spotted an error? Tell us.