Seek for Harmony or Dominance? Gender Differences in Consumer Preference for Color Contrast

ABSTRACT

Despite the widespread application of color contrast in marketing practice, the current understanding of the antecedents of color contrast preferences has been largely overlooked, particularly in relation to heterogeneous consumer characteristics. The present research advances this field by focusing on gender differences in color contrast preferences and demonstrating the underlying mechanism. An observational dataset and four empirical studies provide converging evidence that female consumers prefer products with lower color contrast, while male consumers prefer products with higher color contrast. Moreover, the gender effect persists consistently across different operationalizations of gender and diverse color contrast stimuli in real‐world brand logos and multiple product categories. We also document the harmony–dominance seeking tendency as the mechanism underlying the proposed gender effect, with females tending to seek harmony and males tending to emphasize dominance. Additionally, we confirm the moderating role of relational processing mindset and show that the proposed gender effect is attenuated when consumers adopt a similarity‐focused or dissimilarity‐focused processing mindset.