It has been studied that colours are important pieces of information in everyday life and that they ‘boost memory, engage participation, attract attention, convey messages, and create feeling’. Most importantly, the perceptions of customers must be detected since colours are useful not only to create brand identity and differentiate firms’ offerings from those of the competitors. Despite the awareness of the importance of colours, academic research is not abundant and there is a lack of studies that link colours and prices and try to understand how colours may affect price perceptions and how the effectiveness of different price mechanisms may vary using different colours. Understanding what can influence price perception and price image of products and stores is paramount for retailers that operate in the fast moving consumer goods market (FMCG), since it is one of the main factors that affect products and store-format choices (supermarkets, hypermarkets, convenience, stores, discounts, drugstores). Based on these consideration, the present work intends to fill in the gap found by the authors among literature by understanding how colours can affect the effectiveness of instore offers of products exposed in special displays. Thus, by combining three elements, colours, pricing and space (display versus special display), we want to measure the impact on sales and customers’ perceptions of price image of different price communications in the FMCG market. In order to test the hypothesis just discussed, the present work uses a 3x2 (red vs yellow special display and control condition where no special displays are implemented/discount vs LPG price deal) experiment conducted in a real store environment. Thanks to the collaboration of a leading chain operating in the FMCG market (specifically a drugstore chain) we had the possibility to implement the four options identified in six different stores for a two-week period, two of them served as control stores, where no special displays were installed. The results obtained from a three-way analysis (instore observations, instore questionnaires and sales data) can add valuable pieces of information regarding the effectinevess of colours in improving the performance of instore marketing strategies
