Hometown-Multimedia is going to start publishing articles and research of our own; in addition to sharing published articles, we think you will find interesting about the world of business! This will keep us on our toes with the latest business research available and provide our clients with information that can help them in their business management and digital marketing efforts. The first article is research conducted by us to help businesses choose the colors they want to use in their branding, marketing, and advertising efforts! In other words: What is the best color for my brand?

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Since this research was conducted, the author has graduated from Ohio University completing the B.S.A.M. listed in the abstract. 

Issues

The first scientific debate you encounter when studying color psychology is found between scientists and philosophers, who for centuries went back and forth: is a color a part of an object, or is it something we perceive in our mind and put onto objects? The former is from the perception theories of Aristotle and Scholastic models, the latter was introduced in the scientific revolution. Malcolm Harris of The New Republic Magazine explains,

The early history on the color perception debate alternated between partisans of these two camps. The Scholastic or Aristotelian model is a simple realism: Objects have colors that observers perceive in them. Like a seal that leaves a stamp in hot wax, an object’s color leaves its imprint temporarily on our eye. Since Scholastic realism presents no conflict between what we see and what there is, it was a convincing and long-lasting explanation. Color is what it looks like. In the seventeenth century, the scientific revolution turned this common-sense explanation on its head. Galileo, that philosopher of inversions, suspected the realists had it exactly wrong. Colors, he wrote in Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), “hold their residence solely in the sensitive body; so that if the animal were removed, every such quality would be abolished and annihilated.

Another issue you will find when researching interpretation of color is much more related to consumer behavior. Can we take a color pyramid and simplify it to universal meanings? Many different websites have published classifications that claim to have universal definitions of color but do not back this up with any academic or business citation (Yang, 2016; Celebrity-Wallpapers, 2018). In some I found you can even find contradictory definitions in the same color (Color Meanings and Symbolism, 2018).

Our interpretation of color is based on a wide range of factors making up a “perceptual set.” In the book, Psychology: Themes and Variations by Wayne Weiten of the University of Las Vegas, Nevada (Weiten, 2008), he explains why a “reversible figure”—a trick image—can be interpreted more than one way.

“The same visual input can result in radically different perceptions. There is no one-to-one correspondence between sensory input and what you perceive. This is a principal reason that peoples experience of the world is subjective. Perception involves much more than passively receiving signals from the outside world. It involves interpretation of sensory input. In this case, your interpretations result in two different “realities” because your expectations have been manipulated. Information given to you about the drawing has created a perceptual set—a readiness to perceive a stimulus in a particular way.”

As pointed out by Saul McLeod, of the University of Manchester, (Perceptual Set, 2007; Leeper, 1935) researchers have found four factors that make up our perceptual sets: expectation, emotion, motivation, and culture. These varying factors make any universal classification questionable at best, completely useless at worst. I predict the reason for the endless attempts to find a universal classification of color for business is simple. When building a brand, businesses want a universal answer or process to answer the question:

What is the best color for my brand?

They also want to know what color is going to give them the best results in their marketing campaigns and advertising.

Though there is no universal meaning for colors, studies do indicate when we break people down by different groups like by culture and gender, then we can begin to measure what specific colors are associated with in emotions, mood, personality, and what they are used for in industry. I believe the reason for this is simple, these groups are broken down by perceptual sets, or in other words, the people in these groups have similar perceptual sets. Therefore, color psychology research is prominent in business practices. Business is about breaking people down into groups, or demographics and then targeting them with branding, marketing, and advertising. When researched, color psychology is used by brands to predict and encourage consumer behavior, as well as mold their image to increase cognitive associations with their brand.

The largest issue a business can run into with color psychology is a failure to do proper research in an emerging market and having serious unintended consequences from conveying the wrong message. Since colors are associated with things like culture, gender, emotions, personality, mood, and industry. It is important for businesses to select the right colors, so they do not convey the wrong meaning when developing international marketing campaigns. To avoid future international marketing blunders, Pinfan Zhu from Texas State University, did a research article on the phenomena and explains how colors can be translated differently by cultures.

For example, red is used to indicate the going up of stock value and green is used to indicate the lowering of stock value at a stock market in China while in America, things are just opposite. Also, American people wear dark clothing at a funeral ceremony while the Chinese wear white clothing for such an occasion. In English, there are expressions such as “Mr. Thompson is very white,” “The manager looks rather green,” “The sales representative is feeling so blue,” and “The kids were tickled pink to see pandas.” But they are expressed in different ways in which no color word is used in Chinese (Cross-Cultural Blunders in Professional Communication from a Semantic Perspective, 2010).

Like language, cultural associations with different colors can cause big issues in the business world (Adam, 2011): In the 1950’s Pepsi lost majority share to Coca-Cola in a southeastern Asian market, because it changed its vending machine colors from a dark blue to a light blue; as it turns out in that part of the world, light blue is commonly associated with death and mourning (Czinkota & Ronkainen, 2007). A telecommunications and internet company in France named “Orange” come up with a slogan in the 1990’s saying the “The Future is Bright – The Future is Orange.” When a crisis emerged in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, one radical Protestant supremacist group become very popular with the name “Orange Order.” Wanting to expand into the Northern Ireland market but not wanting their slogan to be interpreted as promoting a future of protestant supremacy and refusing to alienate the Catholic half of the population; they considered changing the company name altogether (Tooher, 1996) but settled for an alteration in their slogan and adapting their logo (Johny K. Johansson, 2015). The company did well with the new slogan and logo and is a great example of a business making sure they did not offend anyone before they used Color Psychology in a new market.

To avoid this cultural problem researchers at the University of Sydney created an experiment aimed to develop, you guessed it, a “Universal Color Grid.” They did this without using verbal labels (language) or shades of varying colors. Respondents were given a full-screen grid of the entire color spectrum and then shown a series of photos and asked to use a cursor to show what color best symbolizes what they see in the photos. This is different than previous research, which showed respondents shades of colors and asked them which was most closely associated with words like “love.” The Universal Color Grid experiment then took the cursor data from respondents and used cluster algorithms to represent each photo and develop a connection based on those clusters. The idea behind this experiment is to introduce it to businesses to conduct market research and develop more comprehensive color theories, “data could be analysed according to culture or any other potential relevant market segmentation variable, to examine whether the colour of a given brand or product varies according to that variable… the UGI could be used to test a priori, theory-driven differences (Areni & Sutton-Brady, 2011).” Despite their well thought out intentions, there are no reports to date indicating companies have picked up this method for branding, advertising, and marketing.

Another issue concerning color in branding, marketing, and advertising become prominent with the proliferation of color printing in advertising during the 1960s and into the 1970s. Despite the common belief that print advertising is all but a thing of the past (Rosenwald, 2016 ), growing evidence suggests that print advertising suffered a great reduction of business; but will not ever fully yield to digital content (HubCast, 2015; Printing Impressions, 2015; Robb, 2015; May, 2014; Alter, 2015). Giving print is likely here to stay for the foreseeable future, there is still credence to the question, “Is color print more cost-effective than black and white?” It is important for businesses that rely on print advertising to know if paying the extra money for color, will result in them gaining higher sales.

Previous studies lacked empirical data on the sales aspect of this question (Printers Ink, 1963; Ray, Sawyer, & Strong, 1971; Hendon, 1973; Aaker & Myers, 1975). So, in 1980, Associate Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, Richard Sparkman Jr, and Associate Dean of Quantitative Sciences in the College of Business Administration also at Texas Tech University, both set out to answer that question in an article for the Journal of Advertising (The effect on sales of color in newspaper advertisements). Their conclusion was that “median sales volume gains of approximately 41% may be realized by using one-color, single exposure newspaper ads, instead of otherwise identical black and white ads.” Further studies done since then have also found colors more effective than black and white in advertisements (Grønhaug, , Kvitastein, & Grønmo, 1991). However, color seems to be limited in its performance against black and white and appears to be connected to how much time and focus—resources—people give to the advertisement. Further research suggests the more a person pays attention to an advertisement, the more likely it becomes that black and white ads will outperform their color opponents (Shemwell & Lehmann, 2011; Meyers-Levy & Peracchio , 1995).

Best Practices

To understand how companies, use color psychology to represent their brands, it is important to understand that there is a plethora of surveys and studies in this field. This field of study was established in the early 1940s by Hans Eysenck, A Critical and Experimental Study of Colour Preferences in the American Journal of Psychology. All previous studies concluded preference depended completely on individual taste and no consensus was drawn upon (1941). Eysenck studies were followed up by a career of research starting in the 1950s by Faber Birren, the most notable being his book Color psychology and color therapy: a factual study of the influence of color on human life (1961). Since then most studies build on this work but can be very contradictory at times, especially when looked at and critically reviewed (Panigyrakis & Kyrousi, 2015). The common understanding of color psychology relies on the theory of cognitive associative learning (Martindale, 1991; Kauppinen‐Räisänen, 2014), which is essentially consumers connecting two pieces of information together, one of which is a color and the other representing what consumers associate with said color. Despite the skeptical review of this research and their complaints that it lacks empirical data; relying on cognitive associative learning, and perceptual sets, studies are often used in the fields of branding, marketing and advertising as a common business practice.

Retail stores and restaurants attempt to create pleasant environments with signs and logos to attract people to come inside. Consumers have a very wide variety of choices to make in even the smallest American towns. It is important for companies to know which consumers they are targeting and how their colors can affect their decisions. Take fast food restaurants for example, ask yourself what is their mission? Well, they want to feed as many hungry people as they can—as fast as they can—so they can open another set of seats to feed, yet, even more people. The more people they feed, the more profit they receive. Hence the term, “fast food.” It is not a coincidence the most common color used by fast food chains is red. In the conclusion of her research article, “An examination of Chain Restaurants Exterior Colors and Logo Colors,” Alyssa Mary Dupont cites multiple studies and the reason behind this trend:

This (her) study suggests that red is the most popular color used in the sampled restaurants. Based on the literature review one explanation for this could be the fact that red not only increases the rate of respiration and raises blood pressure, but more importantly increases hunger (Keskar, 2010). Specifically, red triggers stimulation, increases appetite, and attracts attention and causes people to look and potentially stop in as it would on a stop sign or red light. Elliot and Maier (2013) found that wearing red in aggressive competition would be seen as a dominance signal. This could ring true to the popular chain restaurants ruling the food industry competition such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and KFC (2014).

Though it is obvious companies are using red in branding and advertising to get people to stop and come inside. There may be another reason for why their actual products sway away from the color red. A study conducted by Cornell Universities “Food & Brand Lab“ aimed to add context to a growing body of evidence suggesting red plates reduce food consumption (Mehta & Zhu , 2009; Genschow, Reutner, & Wänke, 2012) found that increased and decreased Michelson contrast in colors (Studies in Optics, 1927) between your food and your plate can affect how much you eat (Wansink & Ittersum, 2012). Studies connecting food to appetite go as far back as the 1970’s and 1980’s, a study written by Alexander G. Schauss, Ph.D. cites a study carried out by the U.S. Naval Office of Research, in the Health, Weight and Stress Clinic at John Hopkins University Hospital found a link between a shade of pink and appetite loss, though he says further research is on-going (The Physiological Effect of Color on the Suppression of Human Aggression: Research on Baker-Miller Pink, 1985).

Given these studies and the data gained from them, in combination with the profit objectives of the fast food industry, e.g., get them into their restaurant/drive-thru, increase their appetite and then feed them as much food as possible in as short amount of time as possible; no wonder the fast industry is dominated by companies who use the color red in a variety of ways. Though the earlier research is hardly conclusive, there does seem to be a consensus among the major chains in the food industry that color psychology research can be incredibly beneficial for them to use to not only predict, but to encourage consumer behavior.

In combination with common held things like value and quality, reputation plays a major role in a consumer’s decision to purchase. The Reputation Institute tracks relevant variables connected to business reputation and publishes a worldwide top 100 list. They have forecasted a -7.9 % downward trend in purchase intent because of reputation decline (Reputation Institute, 2018). Knowing the old cliché, “word of mouth is the better than advertising” businesses are fighting to earn and keep consumers trust. Because reputation plays so heavily into the identity of a company, and color also plays a major role in shaping identity, a lot of effort goes into selecting colors.

Starbucks is a very famous brand, that can be a great example of a company using color to create an identity and build a reputation. In 2017, Starbucks reported revenues in excess of $22 Billion, looking at their growth on a bar graph—with the one exception of 2009—is almost like looking at a perfect rising staircase (Statista, 2018). Starbucks is great at using colors in their branding to increase the chances people will buy from them. Researchers have found the color green is often associated with peaceful thoughts (Elliot & Maier, 2013), and is also associated to nature which gives us pleasant feelings (Almusaed, 2011). Now, let’s again consider their objective, this time by looking at their targeted demographic: high income, urban professionals, highly technical and young, socially conscious, laid back but driven (Bean-Mellinger, 2018). These are the people that are on their way to work or on a break and want to relax and rejuvenate with cup of coffee for a few minutes before they head back to work or school. Considering these objectives, and the associations found with green, it makes sense they would offer high-speed Wi-Fi, use a green mermaid logo and paint the walls inside their stores green to build a reputation as a place to get out of the hectic urban environment and relax for a while. Given their steady increases in revenue, I think they have connected this message to their target audiences. It also makes sense that they would do the same thing in their branding to help advertise that reputation to other potential customers. Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz gave us rare insight into a large company’s decision to change its look when he talked about Starbucks decision to change logos at the companies unveiling of a sleeker simpler—albeit still green—logo for its 40^th anniversary in 2011. The company also expressed its intent to venture into the food market. The quote certainly falls right in line with the common practice of using colors and other forms of psychology to help them make that decision.

This new evolution of the logo does two things that are very important; it embraces and respects our heritage and at the same time evolves us to a point where we feel it’s more suitable to the future… the world has changed, and Starbucks has changed… The new interpretation of the logo at its core is the exact same essence of the Starbucks experience. And that is the love we have for our coffee; the relationship we have with our partners and the connection we build with our customers. What I think we’ve done is we’ve allowed her to come out of the circle in a way that I think (the new logo) gives us the freedom and flexibility to think beyond coffee. But make no mistake. We have been, we will continue to be, and we always will be the world’s leading purveyor of the highest quality coffee (Reimer, 2011).

Perceptual sets make people cognitively associate colors differently. So, there is no one-single answer to the questions “What is the best color for my brand?” “What color should I use in advertising?” However, there does seem to be a consensus among businesses as to the most effective way to answer these questions by answering a few other ones: What are our objectives? What kind of personality do we want to portray? What audience are we targeting with our product? Based on the most current research, what colors associations are most likely to help achieve those objectives, and express the personality we are trying to portray to our target audience (Ciotti , 2018; DashBurst: Part of the Small Business Trends Publisher Channel, 2017; Homestead, 2013)?

Academic Research

The basis of this paper is made upon a psychological learning model known as cognitive associative learning, which is the idea that we have conditioned associations with colors that affect our preferences. I would add that these associations and preferences are based on perceptual sets i.e. expectation, emotion, motivation, and culture. In addition to this it is my belief that many different similar sets can be grouped together by things like age, race, gender, culture, and income and that companies from a variety of industries (which also can be a variable in color association) do in fact use color psychology to target these similar sets, more commonly known in the business world as demographics. To demonstrate this is, in fact, true, there a hundreds of studies with different aims to make that point. I found a few studies in this field to help support this essay.

The first is called, Measuring the Strength of Color Brand-Name Links, and it showed that while color cannot be used as a brand identifier itself when given a color prompt respondents correctly associated colors with famous brands. This study was done by Jenni Romaniuk and Magda Nenycz-Theil both of the Ehrenber-Bass Institute. Data were collected in October 2009 and published in the Journal of Advertising Research. The type of research conducted was done to answer a myriad of questions, one of which was measuring if cuing brand name with color on materials like logos, increased the likelihood consumers would be able to identify the brand? So, was it smart for Starbucks to take their name off their logo when they went to a simple, sleek design in 2011? Furthermore, would consumers identify their logo by the color and shape with no written language in the logo?

Methodology and design used was a 2 x 2 between-subjects design. A group of 880 people was recruited with a gender and age quota to ensure a representative population. This group was split by three different categories (industries): banking, chocolate, and hair care giving approximately 200 respondents per cell for each treatment. In each category, every individual received different treatments to ensure no one modified their responses due to a learning effect. They were asked prompted and unprompted questions regarding two factors, brand name, and color. The color cues included a name of the color and shade to minimize perception differences as a variability. In the prompted questions they were given color or brand cues, a list of responses, and an open-ended text-box. Multiple responses were allowed and a “none-of-these” option provided to discourage guessing. In the unprompted questions, they were given color or brand cues, with no list of responses and only the text-box.

Though the study included two metrics, fame and uniqueness. Uniqueness was relative to competitors, thus irrelevant to me to make my point. However, fame was measured by the proportion of people who correctly or incorrectly linked the brand to the color cue by dividing the sample size. “If 30% of consumers recall the brand when prompted with green then it has 30% fame.” In the conclusion the authors of this research state,

The importance of fame is in its link to risk. Risk, in this instance, is the level of failed links—or the proportion of consumers who do not link the brand to the element. If fame is 100 percent, then there is lit­tle or no risk. The fewer the consumers who make the link, the greater the risk that the identity element will be ineffectual, and the consumer will fail to identify the brand.

Thus, if your brand is famous—like Starbucks— is highly likely consumers already associate a color to your company, and thus it is safe to assume they will identify your company with its color and logo and do not need to be reminded by a cue of the name (2014 ).

The second research study I will use is a little dated, but it supports the fact that while advertisers could be better at using color preference to target gender—at least in 1989-1990 when the study was published—they were actively using color associations and preference in magazine advertising to target people based on their race and culture. The research was conducted in 1988 by Seonsu Lee, M.B.A. East Texas State University and James H. Barnes associate professor, The University of Mississippi. There were two stated hypothesis’, though only one of which is relevant to my point: “There is no difference in color usage between black-and-white-oriented magazine advertisements.” There chosen methodology was stated “The research technique used for this study was a content analysis of magazine advertisements. Content analysis is a research methodology that utilizes a set of structured procedures to make valid inferences from text or, in the present case, color content in the advertisements.” To test this hypothesis, they chose a white-oriented magazine and a black-oriented magazine both cited as similar in content and presentation. The data collected, was every advertisement appearing in both magazines, color was classified using standard color hues, and only dominant colors were judged by two independent scores and analyzed using a log-linear model.

These models rely on a particular approach to the definition of interaction between or among variables in multidimensional contingency tables, based on cross-product ratios of expected cell values. As a result, the models are linear in the logarithms of the expected value scale: hence the term log-linear models. In Contingency table analysis, these models are used to describe the structural relationships among the variables corresponding to the dimensions of the table. In the present analysis, we are interested in the structural relationship among the variables color, magazine advertisement, and product.

Then two tables were made with three columns classifying statistically relevant information, rows listed the effect name—the colors being tested— and the corresponding statistics along with them. Only 20 color combinations were at or above the .05 level showing any significance. Table two gives the authors the appropriate information to conclude.

Table 2 gives the partial chi-square and the probabilities for all the significant associations. The effect name column designates each significant association examined in the analysis. The top row shows the association between white, green, and blue. In that row we can see the following statistics: there is 1-degree of freedom in the association, the partial chi-square is 10.95, and the probability that an association this large could occur by sampling error is 0.00. We return to our original question of whether the effects of color in magazine advertising differ between black- and white-oriented magazines. The black-red magazine, black-violet magazine, and the green-violet magazine rows show that the difference for those colors are significant and at most, the result could be obtained from sampling error 4 times out of a 100.

The authors of this study, concede that there are color differences by advertisers based on race and culture. Though they point out the assumptions of color preference made by advertisers in correlation to previous studies showing actual color preference, indicate room for improvement by the advertisers, (African-Americans were assumed to like the color purple more than studies indicated) they were able to find difference none-the-less. I cannot help but wonder if the authors of this study conducted one to measure the same magazines use of color based on other perceptual sets, or associations with mood and industry, if they would not have been more impressed with the advertiser’s abilities to use color to influence consumers.

Take for instance this very recent study done by researchers from the University of Cincinnati, Lundquist College of Business, and the University or Oregon. Based on previous research their aim was to find a way to reach “green” eco-friendly consumers. The researchers found 239 online respondents, each participant was given a product logo representing 16 different colors used by various retailers. After receiving some monetary gain, and giving their consent, they were provided a profile of a fake retail grocery store accompanied by a logo, again representing 16 different colors used by real retailers,

A professional designer created a test logo in which the graphical composition was ambiguous with respect to eco-friendliness. Designed on a circular template, half the logo consisted of the outline of a cogged wheel, and the other half consisted of the outline of a globe (see Fig. 2). Participants were asked to evaluate “How eco-friendly do you suppose DAVY Grocery Store is?” (anchored: 1 = “not at all eco-friendly,” 7 = “very eco-friendly”).

The researchers eliminated participants identified as color blind and calculated the following ratings in accordance to the data collected from responses.

Participants rated the retailer as most eco-friendly when it was represented by a logo featuring blue (M = 5.00, SD = 1.22). The two colors rated lowest in eco-friendliness were both shades of red: Trader Joe’s red (M = 3.85, SD = 1.61) and Target red (M = 3.78, SD = 1.84). Thus, we used blue and red as the high and low eco-friendly colors, respectively, in Studies 1, 2a, 2c, 3, and 4, because they differed statistically in perceived eco-friendliness (t(25) = 2.06, p < .05). In Studies 2b, 2c, and 4, we used the color green (M = 4.87, SD = 1.02), which did not differ statistically from the color blue (p = .77).

This study allowed them to identify which colors were most associated with being environmentally friendly. Surprisingly, Aldi blue was found to be the eco-friendliest. Two pretests we conducted, one to eliminate associations made to retailers.

To rule out the possibility that any of the colors used in the studies would be associated with a specific, identifiable retailer, we conducted a follow-up pretest (n = 154) with the three colors mentioned previously (blue, green, and red). After eliminating six responses because of self-identified color blindness, we examined 148 responses (43.2 % female, M age = 20.08). The six stimuli used consisted of the words “red,” “green,” or “blue” or visual exposure to the actual color red, blue, or green. Each participant was exposed to one of the six stimuli in a randomized, between-subjects design. After viewing the stimuli, participants performed a sentence completion task: “I associate this color with retailers such as _______ (list one or more stores).” This item was presented among filler items (“How typical is this practice?” “How creative is this practice?” “How interesting does the store sound?” “How useful do you think the store is to shoppers?” We selected these fillers from a pretest that showed no difference in conditions). The order of presentation of the stimuli was randomized.

The second to determine ethical perceptions of ethically controversial practices,

We conducted this pretest (n = 226) to determine ethical perceptions of common retail practices that could be construed as ethically controversial. The goal of this pretest was to select exemplars of ethically ambiguous (mid-scale) practices for use in the main studies. We also wanted to identify practices that were judged as unambiguously ethical or unethical (for Study 3). We formulated 10 statements describing common, ethically controversial retailer practices from consumer blog sites. See Table 3. Participants were randomly assigned to read one statement in a between-subjects design. Participants were told, “This common retail practice is perfectly legal. However, opinions differ widely concerning how ethical the practice is. How would you rate this practice in terms of ethics?” (anchored: 1 = “not ethical at all,” 7 = “very ethical”; adapted from Dabholkar and Kellaris 1992 (Toward understanding marketing students’ ethical judgment of controversial personal selling practices); this article lists 20 scenarios in personal selling and asked participants to rate each from “very unethical” to “very ethical.” In the current research, we reworded the scale description to capture judgments of ethicality of the retailer).

Two additional studies were conducted but not relevant to color psychology. The most important information we draw from this study is that consumers do in fact make assumptions about brands and products based on color and that businesses do try to use colors to mold those assumptions. The conclusion showed that the participants found the color green does make a consumer lean towards believing the company Is more environmentally friendly, the color blue is considered the most environmentally friendly and most importantly, consumers associate colors in their opinions about how ethically responsible a company might or might not be (Sundar & Kellaris, 2017).

When the CEO of Spell Brand, an expert in brand strategy and design, decided to make a top 10 list for eco-friendly logos, 7 of his 10 incorporated the color green, 9 out of 10 either incorporated green or blue, and his top 2 spots for environmentally friendly logos incorporated both the colors green and blue (Bonigala, 2018). Furthermore, the study conducted by the University of Sydney, the Universal Color Grid, cited in the issues section of this essay, supports the idea that there is a demand in the business world for a proven system in the applications of color psychology in their branding, marketing and advertising practices. Given the overwhelming amount of studies out there, and more importantly the studies I have cited, I do not think there is any doubt that advertisers have since implemented more targeted uses of colors since 1989. I do believe there are so many variables making up perceptual sets, that when thrown against the endless number of different market segments consumers can and are daily broken into, that the number of factors playing out in this field makes it tricky. However, I do not believe that is stopping academics and businesses alike from studying it. Furthermore, I believe businesses are relying on these studies to make decisions and they are eager for more of them to come out in the future.

Copyright James C. Shively © 2019

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