Colours as Non-Verbal Signs on Packages

Colour is an essential aspect of our daily life, and still, it is a neglected issue within marketing research. The main reason for studying colours is to understand the impact of colours on consumer behaviour, and thus, colours should be studied when it comes to branding, advertising, packages, interiors, and the clothes of the employees, for example. This was an exploratory study about the impact of colours on packages. The focus was on low-involvement purchasing, where the consumer puts limited effort into the decision-making. The basis was a scenario in which the consumer faces an unpredictable problem needing immediate action. The consumer may be in hurry, which indicate time pressure. The consumer may lack brand preferences, or the preferred brand may be out of stock. The issue is that the choice is to be made at the point of purchase. Further, the purchasing involves product classes where the core products behind the brands are indistinguishable from each other. Three research questions were posed. Two questions were answered by conjoint analysis, i.e. if colours have an impact on decision-making and if a possible impact is related to the product class. 16 hypothetical packages were designed in two product classes within the healthcare, i.e. painkillers and medicine against sore throats. The last research question aimed at detecting how an analysis could be carried out in order to understand the impact of colours. This question was answered by conducting interviews that were analysed by applying laddering method and a semiotics approach. The study found that colours do indeed have an impact on consumer behaviour, this being related to the context, such as product class. The role of colours on packages was found to be threefold: attention, aesthetics, and communication. The study focused on colours as a means of communication, and it proposes that colours convey product, brand, and product class meanings, these meanings having an impact on consumers’ decision-making at the point of purchase. In addition, the study demonstrates how design elements such as colours can be understood by regarding them as non-verbal signs. The study also presents an empirical design, involving quantitative and qualitative techniques that can be used to gain in depth understanding of the impact of design elements on consumer behaviour. Hannele Kauppinen is associated with CERS, the Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management of the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration

Legal Reasoning in Context

This study in EU law analyses the reasoning of the Court of Justice (the Court of Justice of the European Union) in a set of its preliminary rulings. Preliminary rulings are answers to national courts questions on the interpretation (and validity) of EU law called preliminary references. These questions concern specific legal issues that have arisen in legal disputes before the national courts. The Court of Justice alone has the ultimate authority to interpret EU law. The preliminary rulings bind the national courts in the cases giving rise to the preliminary reference, and the interpretations of EU law offered in the preliminary rulings are considered generally binding on all instances applying EU law. EU law is often described as a dynamic legal order and the Court of Justice as at the vanguard of developing it. It is generally assumed that the Court of Justice is striving to realise the EU s meta-level purpose (telos): integration. Against this backdrop one can understand the criticism the Court of Justice is often faced with in certain fields of EU law that can be described as developing. This criticism concerns the Court s (negatively) activist way of not just stating the law but developing or even making law. It is difficult to analyse or prove wrong this accusation as it is not in methodological terms clearly established what constitutes judicial activism, or more exactly where the threshold of negative activism lies. Moreover, one popular approach to assessing the role of the Court of Justice described as integration through law has become fairly political, neglecting to take into consideration the special nature of law as both facilitating and constraining action, not merely a medium for furthering integration. This study offers a legal reasoning approach of a more legalist nature, in order to balance the existing mix of approaches to explaining what the Court of Justice does and how. Reliance on legal reasoning is found to offer a working framework for analysis, whereas the tools for an analysis based on activism are found lacking. The legal reasoning approach enables one to assess whether or not the Court of Justice is pertaining to its own established criteria of interpretation of EU law, and if it is not, one should look more in detail at how the interpretation fits with earlier case-law and doctrines of EU law. This study examines the reasoning of the Court of Justice in a set of objectively chosen cases. The emphasis of the study is on analysing how the Court of Justice applies the established criteria of interpretation it has assumed for itself. Moreover, the judgments are assessed not only in terms of reasoning but also for meaningful silences they contain. The analysis is furthermore contextualised by taking into consideration how the cases were commented by legal scholars, their substantive EU law context, and also their larger politico-historical context. In this study, the analysis largely shows that the Court of Justice is interpreting EU law in accordance with its previous practice. Its reasoning retains connection with the linguistic or semiotic criteria of interpretation, while emphasis lies on systemic reasoning. Moreover, although there are a few judgments where the Court of Justice offers clearly dynamic reasoning or what can be considered as substantive reasoning stemming from, for example, common sense or reasonableness, such reasons are most often given in addition to systemic ones. In this sense and even when considered in its broader context, the case-law analysed in this study does not portray a specifically activist image of the Court of Justice. The legal reasoning approach is a valid alternative for explaining how and why the Court of Justice interprets EU law as it does.