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This article aims to determine how packaging colour (hue, saturation and brightness) for a healthy food product might influence children's evaluation of the packaging and their attitude towards the brand.

An experiment involving 157 children (7–12 years of age) features a within-subject, factorial design. The product selected for this experiment is an unknown brand of orange juice.

Each colour dimension on packaging exerts an impact on children's evaluation of the packaging and attitude towards the brand. Therefore, the colour featured on packaging can be an effective lever for action to ensure and enhance children's healthy diets.

Further research should investigate these effects across additional product categories, brands and colours.

Packaging is an important marketing tool that influences children's evaluation of the packaging and attitude towards the brand, especially at the point of sale. To understand and exploit these packaging colour effects appropriately for healthy products, it is crucial to understand the effects of various packaging colour dimensions.

Little prior research has addressed the effects of packaging on children's responses, especially by accounting for multiple colour dimensions. Nor has extant research identified how packaging colour dimensions can affect children's evaluation and brand attitude. Especially in consideration of the growing problem of childhood obesity, it is important to give marketers effective ways to promote healthy products.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of packaging colour (chromatic vs achromatic) on children’s brand name memorization (recall and recognition). This research examined the impact of age and school grade on brand name memorization and on the relationship between packaging colour and memorization.

The experimentation concerned 160 French children from seven to 12 years old.

The results showed that chromatic colour of packaging has a positive impact on brand name recognition but not on the recall. Furthermore, the age variable has a significant positive effect on recall capacity but not on brand name recognition.

Other variables can be introduced in the conceptual model, like product involvement (by adding other products), children’s colour preference, hue and value colour (by included diverse colours).

Children’s importance as a commercial target is increasing, marketing managers have to differentiate their products on the shelves. Consequently, the choice of the packaging dominant colour appears to be a crucial strategic decision, because it allows children to recognize the brand name. Professionals have to adapt their strategies of differentiation to children’s ages knowing that younger children need more visual stimuli than older ones.

This research has important theoretical contributions. There is very little research on the effect of packaging on children’s purchasing behaviour. Moreover, no research has studied the impact of colour packaging on children’s memorization (seven to 12 years old).