Think about the last time you browsed a grocery store aisle or scrolled through a product page online. Did the vivid red of a cookie package make you imagine a richer flavor? Did the deep, saturated purple of a towel make you expect it to feel thicker or plusher? If so, you are not alone, and a new investigation suggests your brain may be playing a consistent, predictable trick on you.
A series of five studies published in Psychology & Marketing found that when product colors or packaging colors are more saturated, meaning more vivid, rich, or intense, consumers tend to expect the product’s non-visual qualities to be more intense, too. That includes smell, taste, texture, and even sound. The research also identified a potential reason for this effect: saturated colors appear to make people feel psychologically closer to a product, and that feeling of closeness shifts their attention toward specific sensory details.
A gap in what we know about color
Color has three dimensions. Hue is what most people think of as “color,” like red, blue, or green. Lightness refers to how much white or black is mixed in. And saturation describes how pure, vivid, or intense a color appears. A fire-engine red is highly saturated; a dusty rose is low in saturation. While researchers have studied hue and lightness extensively, saturation has received relatively less attention.
Seth Ketron, a researcher at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, along with colleagues Lauren Labrecque at the University of Rhode Island, Stefanie Sohn at the University of Southern Denmark, and Atefeh Yazdanparast at Clark University, set out to investigate a question that had not been fully answered: Can color saturation shape how people expect a product to smell, taste, feel, or sound? Previous work had shown that saturation can influence whether a product looks bigger, appears healthier, or seems more potent. But the connection between saturation and multiple non-visual senses had not been systematically tested.
The team built their hypothesis on a concept known as cross-modal correspondence. This is the idea that sensory experiences can influence one another across different senses. For example, people in previous experiments have associated lighter colors with softer textures and darker colors with lower-pitched sounds. Ketron and his co-authors predicted that saturation, because it represents visual intensity, would carry over to heighten expectations of intensity in other senses.
How they tested it: five studies, five products, four senses
The researchers ran five separate studies, each focusing on a different product and a different sense, using participants from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
In the first study, 209 undergraduate students in the U.S. were shown one of two bars of soap. Both were the same shade of green and the same brightness, but one was set to low saturation (a muted, grayish green) and the other to high saturation (a vivid green). Participants who saw the highly saturated soap rated its anticipated scent as significantly stronger than those who saw the muted version.
The second study took a different approach. Instead of running a controlled experiment, the researchers collected real consumer review data from Amazon.com for 14 microfiber towel products (covering 50 color variants). They measured the saturation of each product image and then analyzed over 3,600 reviews, looking specifically at how intensely reviewers described the towels’ feel using words like “soft,” “plush,” “fluffy,” “smooth,” and “velvety.” Products with higher saturation had more reviews mentioning touch-related words, and the intensity of those descriptions (for example, “very soft” versus just “soft”) was significantly higher for more saturated products.
Study three shifted to packaging. German university students viewed either a high-saturation or low-saturation version of cookie packaging, with all other design elements held constant. Those exposed to the more saturated packaging anticipated the cookies would taste more intense, smell stronger, and have a crunchier texture. The researchers also used a pictorial scale to measure psychological proximity, a concept that captures how close or connected someone feels to an object. Participants who saw the more saturated packaging reported feeling psychologically closer to the product. Statistical analysis showed a chain of effects: higher saturation was linked to greater psychological proximity, which was linked to higher anticipated sensory intensity across taste, smell, and texture, which in turn was linked to stronger purchase intentions.
The fourth study explored sound. Participants from the United Kingdom viewed either a low-saturation or high-saturation version of a music album cover (with the artist name removed to avoid familiarity effects). Those who saw the more saturated cover expected the music to have faster tempos, louder volume, stronger beats, and more energy. The more saturated album cover also made participants perceive the album as newer, suggesting it felt temporally closer to them. This temporal closeness served as the measure of psychological proximity in this study. The study also introduced an important wrinkle: personal preference for musical intensity mattered. For those who preferred lower-intensity music, the less saturated album cover actually led to higher listening intentions.
The fifth study used physical fabric swatches in two shades of purple, one low in saturation and one high. Eighty-nine students evaluated the swatches on 12 touch-related descriptors and then chose which fabric they would prefer a campus retailer to use for products. The low-saturation fabric was rated softer, lighter, more delicate, and silkier. The high-saturation fabric was perceived as sturdier, thicker, stiffer, and more velvety. When it came to actually choosing a fabric, 64% of participants selected the high-saturation version.
Why does this happen? Feeling closer changes how you think
The researchers grounded their explanation in a psychological theory called construal-level theory. This theory describes how feeling psychologically close to something (in terms of time, space, or social connection) shifts people toward thinking about it in specific, concrete detail, while feeling distant encourages more abstract, big-picture thinking. The idea is that a highly saturated color makes you feel closer to a product. That feeling of closeness, in turn, nudges your brain to focus on the product’s detailed, tangible qualities, including what it might smell, taste, feel, or sound like. And because saturation itself conveys “intensity” in the visual sense, your brain extends that intensity to its expectations about other senses.
The researchers also tested and ruled out several other potential explanations. Processing fluency, which refers to how easy something is to mentally process, did not differ between high- and low-saturation conditions in Study 3. Perceived novelty and nostalgia, tested in Study 4, also showed no significant differences between saturation levels. This left psychological proximity as the most supported explanation among the alternatives tested.
What this means for product and packaging design
For businesses, the practical takeaway is straightforward: color saturation is a low-cost lever that can shape what consumers expect from a product before they ever touch, taste, or smell it. This may be especially relevant for online retail, where the visual impression of a product image is often the only sensory information available to shoppers.
If a brand wants consumers to anticipate a rich, intense sensory experience, say a strongly scented soap, a flavorful snack, or a heavy and plush towel, using higher saturation in product or packaging colors could help set those expectations. Conversely, if a product is designed for consumers who prefer gentler experiences, such as a mild fragrance or a light fabric, lower saturation might better match what those customers are looking for.
However, there are caveats worth noting. The studies focused primarily on lower-priced, lower-involvement products like soap, towels, cookies, and fabric. Whether the same effects hold for expensive items like furniture or high-end clothing remains an open question. The research also focused on anticipated sensory intensity, not actual sensory experience. It is possible that highly saturated packaging could set expectations so high that the real product disappoints, though this was not tested. And while the studies drew on participants from three countries, samples were composed mainly of students and online panelists, which may not represent all consumer groups equally.
The findings also suggest that personalization could play a role. Study 4 demonstrated that people who prefer calmer, less intense music actually favored the less saturated album cover. Brands with diverse customer bases might consider offering different visual presentations depending on what they know about individual preferences, something that online retailers could implement through data-driven personalization tools.
Ultimately, the research points to a simple but potentially powerful idea: the vividness of a color does not just affect how something looks. It can quietly shape what consumers expect to feel, taste, smell, and hear.
