Color Saturation of Travel Pictures on Consumer Appeal: Comparison
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In the Internet era, online channels have contributed significantly to tourism marketing and promotion. Consumers will receive tourism information online to reduce information asymmetry. Moreover, with overwhelming levels of information, consumers may only get a limited amount of information. Visual design is essential among the various factors researchers have thoroughly investigated. Studies have recognized the importance of the color characteristics of travel photos on consumer decisions.

  • saturation
  • geographic distance
  • attractiveness
  • color psychology

1. Introduction

In the internet era, online channels have emerged as important communication channels for the tourism industry. According to the Meituan 2022 National Day Travel Report (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/q5u_Fo1ZXBfNAHoi4qX7Qg (accessed on 1 April 2023)), which highlights key findings and statistics related to travel behaviors, preferences, and destinations among Chinese tourists and provides insights and data on travel trends during China’s National Day holiday in 2022, there was a significant increase in the search volume for keywords such as "local travel and peripheral travel," with a year-over-year surge of 440% observed in the week before the holiday. Consequently, obtaining e-WOM (electronic Word of Mouth) from the internet has become essential for consumers before traveling.
The critical role of online channels in tourism marketing campaigns stems from the information asymmetry between consumers and tourism destinations. Through online access to tourism information, consumers can effectively reduce information asymmetry and influence tourism consumption decisions [1,2][1][2]. Nevertheless, the affordability and accessibility of internet communication expose consumers to a substantial volume of pertinent information when seeking guidance, such as travel recommendations.
The information consumers can access is limited throughout a multitude of information streams. Therefore, the primary concern for marketers lies in determining effective strategies to capture the attention of consumers during this stage; thus, many researchers have focused on visual design to attract the attention of consumers online [3,4,5][3][4][5]. When conducting a quick information search, consumers have limited cognitive processing resources for each piece of information. At this point, they will tend to make decisions through intuitive perceptions rather than logical thinking, which requires much effort [6,7][6][7]. The information conveyed by visual design fulfills this consumer need. Consequently, content disseminated online is often accompanied by photos to attract consumers [8,9,10][8][9][10].
Color is a visual stimulus that contributes significantly to the decision-making of consumers, particularly when they are required to make immediate decisions [11]. Furthermore, color information is involved in tourism marketing; therefore, research on travel photo color represents a prominent area of interest. Although studies have noted the importance of travel photo color characteristics on consumer decision-making, these studies have often focused their analysis on hue information [12,13][12][13]. However, saturation significantly impacts consumers’ intuitive, emotional perceptions [14]. Insufficient discussion regarding the other two dimensions of color, namely saturation, and luminance, for context-specific effects has resulted in different research findings. Color context theory states that the psychological meaning of color varies significantly across contexts [15]. For example, red has a warning meaning in competitive contexts, while it represents sexual attraction in relationship contexts [16,17][16][17]. The study concluded that a similar contextual effect exists in travel photo saturation.
Moreover, low saturation is matched with a more distant psychological distance, whereas high saturation is matched with a closer psychological distance [11,18,19][11][18][19]. This psychological distance may show different effects in different contexts and different types of tourist destinations. When tourist photo content is a nature-based attraction, high-saturation colors are correlated to closer psychological distance and can lead to more positive consumer responses [20]. Contrarily, when tourist photo content is a culture-based attraction, low saturation colors represent greater distance. This, in turn, enhances the attraction of culture-based attractions by highlighting their distance, thereby relatively diminishing the positive effect of high saturation.

2. Influence of Color on Consumer Evaluation

2.1. Psychological Effect of Color

Color-related research in sensory marketing and psychology has predominantly focused on the HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) color space model [21]. This model uses hue, saturation, and luminance to describe colors. The term “hue” in this context refers to the difference in the color name that is closely related to the color light wavelength. The observed change in hue, as the wavelength of light decreases within the visible spectrum, includes a sequence of colors, including red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet. Brightness represents the color brightness degree and refers to the proportion of colored light mixed with white or black light. The higher the brightness, the stronger the light, the brighter the color. Saturation is the color purity and intensity (also known as vividness) representing the proportion of gray light mixed with color light [22], researchers stated that the image’s saturation was the most critical attribute perceived by the respondents, followed by caption description style, hue and brightness [23]. A higher degree of color purity is observed when the proportion of gray light combined with colored light is reduced, leading to increased vividness of the color. The HSV model is proposed based on the physical properties of colored light, yet its three dimensions align closely with the human intuitive perception of color, in contrast to color space models, including RGB (Red, Green and Blue) and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). Therefore, most studies exploring the psychological effects of color have adopted the HSV model. The blue-decorated stores were more likely to sell their goods than the red-decorated stores. This can be attributed to the relaxing and uplifting effect that blue has on individuals, as opposed to the anxiety-inducing impressions of red [24,25][24][25]. The effect of color on consumer evaluations is also supported by electrophysiological evidence. Specifically, red-packaged goods elicit heightened sympathetic nerve activity among consumers, associated with increased nervousness. Conversely, blue-packaged goods elicit reduced sympathetic nerve activity, associated with more relaxation. Consequently, consumers perceive red-packaged products as more likely to threaten their health [26]. Recent studies further enriched the downstream effects of physiological arousal on consumer product evaluations due to color. For instance, color differences affect consumers’ price acceptance of products [4], durability evaluation [27], and immersion experience [28], among others. Besides physiological arousal, color changes the cognitive patterns of consumers. Among them, the correlation between saturation and psychological distance is a primary research direction. Psychological distance refers to the distance between oneself and things perceived by a person-centered on oneself [29,30,31][29][30][31]. Psychological distance contains four main dimensions: temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and probability size [29]. A negative association exists between color saturation and psychological distance. The higher the saturation, the closer the psychological distance. This effect is supported by research on the spatial, temporal, and social dimensions of psychological distance. Regarding spatial distance, in the early 1900s, it was suggested that reducing bright colors in artwork would make viewers feel further away from the work [32]. Moreover, people perceive highly saturated color objects as being closer to them or appearing larger [21,33][21][33]. Regarding temporal distance, Lee et al. observed that in contexts characterized by more temporal distance (e.g., recalling a hotel they stayed in years ago), consumers would perceive low-saturation photos as more consistent with their memories [18]. Regarding social distance, Xiao et al. found that high saturation logo colors could bring the brand closer to consumers. Consequently, this improves consumers’ evaluation of the brand’s warmth trait [19]. Briefly, the higher the saturation, the closer the psychological distance.

2.2. Contextuality of the Psychological Effect of Color

The color context theory is widely accepted among researchers for the influence of color on individuals’ emotions and perceptions and memorization [34,35,36][34][35][36]. Contextual color theory suggests that the psychological effects of color stem from the connection between color and a particular meaning during innate evolutionary and sociocultural processes [15]. The context significantly affects the specific meaning of this connection. For instance, in human society, and depending on the specific context, red represents two different meanings: “warning” and “sexy” [16,17][16][17]. In competitive contexts, people often use red to indicate aggression or to express strong emotions such as anger [37]. Whereas, in relationship contexts related to mate choice, red represents sexiness or sexual openness [2,38][2][38]. Therefore, people may respond differently to the same color in different contexts. For instance, cross-cultural studies of general color preferences confirm that blue is a universally preferred color for humans, while brown and orange are universally disliked colors [39]. However, consumers can strongly reject blue meat foods. Moreover, studies on travel photos have found that the presence of brown and orange elements can significantly increase the likability for those taking photos of urban landscapes [13,40][13][40]. Briefly, attitudes of people toward color are determined mainly by specific contexts. Currently, when exploring the overall state of research, there is a predominant focus on investigating contextual effects of color with a particular emphasis on the hue dimension, particularly the comparison between red and other colors [41]. However, exploring saturation in this context has received comparatively less attention. This study can complement the research on color contextual effects by exploring the different effects of color saturation on tourist photos in different tourist destinations.

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