The effects of the association and the color type on slogan production in the brainstorming

How color affects people's perception and behavior has been drawing attention of researchers and practitioners. In the literature there is some research evidence about the influence of color on perception and consumer behaviors. However, there is few studies how color affects creativity. In this research, the possible effect of color on creativity in brainstorming was investigated with three different colors (red, blue and white). In the literature there is evidence that red color diminishes creativity and blue color enhances creativity. On the other hand, how and in which ways color affects creativity is still not known. In addition, there are only few studies on the presentation of associative examples on creativity. This research is unique one in a sense that both color and association effects (relevant and irrelevant) were investigated in a single research paradigm. In this research it was expected that relevant associations would enhance creativity than irrelevant ones. This is because relevant association should activate available associations in the memory. On the other hand, since the participants in the irrelevant associations condition suffer from establishing bonds among concepts, such difficulty will negatively influence the further brainstorming performance. However, since stimuli or word diversity in the irrelevant association condition is high, such stimuli or words in this condition may lead to a high creative performance. In this regard, the performance in the irrelevant condition may be higher than that in the relevant condition. Testing these contrasting hypotheses is the main aim of this research. Moreover, the plausible interaction between color and association is another focus of the research. When the findings in the literature are considered, it is expected that red color should decrease the creativity. Besides, in the view of consumer behavior literature, it is expected that blue color decrease motivation and performance, because such color is a cold one. Despite various studies on creativity in the literature, there is no research that examines color and association together. In order to analyze these approaches, the effects of the type of association (related and irrelevant connotation) as the first variable and type of color (red, blue and white) as the second variable were examined in slogan production in a brainstorming paradigm. The students enrolled in Konya Necmettin Erbakan University, Ereğli Education Faculty, participated in a brainstorming task for 12 minutes and they were asked to produce slogans. The findings of the research showed that the participants, who were exposed to relevant association, created more ideas than those in irrelevant association. On the other hand, participants who were exposed to white paper were found to produce significantly more ideas than participants who were exposed to red and blue paper. These findings mostly support the associative memory approach. Research has been replicated several times on college students by manipulating variables relevant to the topic; it was observed that the association by itself did not produce a significant effect on creativity.