Despite years of a coordinated advertising and branding campaign, a new study shows that use of the color pink doesn't work so well for awareness of and fundraising for women's issues like breast cancer.
The problem is not that some women are turned off by the traditionalism and underlying stereotype of a pink brand, but rather that too large a proportion of women directly identify with the color. Rotterdam School of Management professor Stefano Puntoni showed in a series of ten experiments over three years that women were less likely to think themselves at risk and less likely to say they would donate to breast or ovarian cancer advertisements if they employed a pink color scheme.
The underlying cause, Puntoni theorized for the Harvard Business Review, is that when a woman perceives that a cancer advertisement is aimed directly at her (by the use of gender-specific colors) then there is a higher likelihood she will subconsciously go into a state of denial.
"By adding all this pink, by asking women to think about gender, you're triggering that [mechanism]," Puntoni told the HBR. "You're raising the idea that this is a female thing. It's pink; it's for you. You could die. "
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