| dc.description.abstract | Sensory marketing, through targeting one or more of the five human senses, offers marketers a host of opportunities. Among others, vision is touted to be the most vital sensory channel, and color is considered the most impactful of all visual perception cues. Color has garnered increasing attention from scholars in recent years. Previous research has investigated the nature and attributes of different colors and their effect on consumer perception. However, theoretical and empirical understanding of the effects of color on behavior and its interaction with other visual elements is limited, with little attention paid to the cross-cultural implications of color. The current research, through a series of nine between-subjects experiments, attempts to theoretically and empirically demonstrate how color temperature, categorized into warm and cool, affects consumer indulgence in a host of consumption scenarios in retail environments. Study 1 establishes the principal hypothesis of this research that warm colors, in comparison with cool colors, push consumers towards greater indulgence, whereas Study 2 supports the findings of Study 1 by ruling out competing explanations of the color temperature effect. Study 3 tests the proposed color temperature—indulgence hypothesis in a non-food indulgence context. Study 4 establishes the sequential mediating effect of arousal and self-reward focus, whereas Study 5 extrapolates the findings of Study 4 in a field study and adds to its robustness by modeling and testing competing mediation mechanisms. Study 6 establishes the moderating effect of (matte/glossy) reflectance on the main effect, while Study 7 tests the conditional effect of reflectance, revealing where the conditional moderation takes place in the color—arousal—self-reward—indulgence path. Study 8 adds another visual cue of autonomy of shape and tests the three-way interaction between color temperature, reflectance, and autonomy of shape on indulgence. Study 9 tests the conditional effect of masculinity/femininity in the color—arousal—indulgence relationship. Overall, this research extends and adds to the existing theoretical and empirical knowledge on color temperature and its effect on indulgence. The research provides a better theoretical understanding of how color temperature influences consumer indulgence, how it interacts with other visual elements, and how the color effect is enabled through the psychological processes across cultures. The practical and effective applications of color temperature, along with reflectance and autonomy of shape in retail atmospherics are also discussed. | en_US |