Does age affect color preferences?

When marketing your business, it is necessary to know who your target audience is in order to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly. When examining your audience, age is a component to consider carefully. Your target audience’s age can affect how your marketing materials are perceived, especially considering color preference varies based on age.

In Faber Birren’s book Color Psychology and Color Therapy, he examines which colors are preferable based on several different age groups. He found that blue and red are consistently preferable throughout life. Yellow is liked by children, but preference tends to decrease as age increases. The majority of responses from Birren’s survey consist of blue, green, and violet as favorable colors throughout most of the age groups. The perceived color of light varies with wavelength, going from violet at the shortest wavelength to red at the longest. As people mature they prefer color of shorter wavelength (blue, green, violet) rather than colors of longer wavelength (red, orange, yellow).

So before creating marketing materials, be sure to examine what colors are most preferable to your target audience. Remember, color psychology is not exact and there are no right or wrong colors, just colors that may get a better response from your target market.