Social exclusion refers to negative interpersonal experience in which an individual or a group is excluded or rejected by others. In daily life, human beings always suffer from various kinds of social exclusion, such as being neglected, discriminated, abused, or bullied, etc. As one of the most common social experience, social exclusion exists everywhere (Williams, 2007; Nezlek et al., 2015). For example, friend requests are declined by others via social platforms; membership application into a certain club is denied; credit card application is rejected by banks. It is reported that nearly 80% of people had been excluded at their workplace (O’Reilly et al., 2015).

In recent years, increasing evidence suggested that social exclusion can change individual’s behaviors, leading to diverse consumption patterns like conformity consumption (Mead et al., 2011), conspicuous consumption (Lee and Shrum, 2012), luxuries consumption (Molden et al., 2009; Lee and Shrum, 2012), uniqueness and status consumption (Wan et al., 2014). For instance, social excluded individuals are likely to feel their social status in existing relationships is diminished or lost, thus they tend to seek social acceptance through conspicuous consumption (Molden et al., 2009; Lee and Shrum, 2012). Studies also revealed social excluded customers prefer to buying products of nostalgia (Loveland et al., 2010), anthropomorphism (Chen et al., 2017), for consuming such products helps to make up for their internal defects and alleviate the negative effects of social exclusion. Despite a series of research has been performed to study the consumption types and their effects on the elimination of social exclusions, it is still unclear whether the appearance of products would impact the negative impacts of social exclusion or not, especially regarding the color of the products.

Color is an essential element that plays important roles in sensory consumption. Indeed, it has long been recognized as one of the most representative visual cues concerning the possible sensory properties. To date, multiple laboratory research has demonstrated that altering the product color can exert a dramatic influence on the expectations, and hence on the subsequent experiences of consumers (Spence, 2015b). As a consequence, an emerging research field lies in the sensory marketing in terms of color, which considerably influences consumer decision making. A series of questions naturally arise: does social exclusion affect people’s choice for products of different colors? If so, what colors do they prefer? What are the underlying psychological mechanisms? Although remarkable progress has been achieved both in the social exclusion and sensory marketing field, there is still rather limited research focusing on the impact of social exclusion on consumers’ product preferences from a sensory marketing perspective. Little attention was paid from the sensory marketing perspective to explicit how social exclusion influences consumers’ color preference.

Based on the compensatory consumption theory, this study systematically discusses the above problems by applying the empirical method. Hopefully it can correlate social exclusion and sensory marketing together, and to further clarify the underlying mechanisms.

Social exclusion, including social rejection, social exclusion, and ostracism, has been widely discussed across multi-disciplines, such as social psychology (Doolaard et al., 2020), anthropology (Peruzzi, 2014). People often experience instances of being ignored or rejected in their relationships with family, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances (Rajchert and Winiewski, 2017), making them feel they are excluded from others, and cannot integrate into the group. Thus, they cannot acquire the sense of belonging of the group. In addition, social exclusion causes a series of negative effects on people’s cognition, physiology and psychology. For example, social exclusion increases aggression and decreases helping behavior toward the excluder, while encourages more prosocial behavior to new potential relationship partners (Rajchert and Winiewski, 2017). Due to social exclusion, the perception of time can be distorted (Bargh and Shalev, 2012; IJzerman et al., 2012). Furthermore, it directly triggers negative psychological reactions in the excluded person, such as anxiety, loneliness, jealousy, depression, and other negative emotions (Freedman et al., 2016).

In recent years, the theoretical concept of social exclusion has been applied to consumer behavior by scholars, primarily focusing on the responses of the social-excluded consumers in the aspects of their cognitive, physiological, psychological, and purchases behaviors. When applied to the field of the consumer behavior, it is seen that people will compensate the negative feeling of social exclusion through consumption to regain their social inclusion. Thus, the choice of product is a strategic behavior which orients toward the goal of gaining a sense of social belonging. The impact of social exclusion on consumer behavior has been investigated by many marketing scholars from the perspective of relationship facilitation responses. In response to the negative experience of social exclusion, consumers may develop a preference for products of particular characteristics. Specifically, to gain a sense of belonging and to repair social relationships, social excluded consumers are more inclined to purchase products related to group identity, but hide their real consumption habits instead of imitating the consumption preferences of social objects. This study explains their preference for warm and cool colors from this perspective.

Social exclusion raises several issues that trigger self-threat (influenced by an individual’s trait self-esteem). Belongingness is one of the fundamental needs of human beings, but can be threaten by social exclusion. As a result, it brings a series of negative consequences, like severe psychological, behavioral, and cognitive impairments. A salient example was reported by Eck et al. (2017), in which social exclusion was found to threaten the basic needs of human, including belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. As revealed by Stillman et al. (2009), social exclusion would make individuals perceive life as less meaningful. It reminds people of the fragility of their lives and is therefore often perceived as social death (Williams et al., 2000), leading to negative reactions such as depression (Baumeister and Tice, 1990), anger, sadness (Williams et al., 2000). In addition to self-threat, social exclusion causes decrements in self-regulation, further reduces the sense of self-control. Excluded individuals tend to strive for a positive self-view and use all kinds of strategies to reestablish or heighten their self-esteem (Hoefler et al., 2015).

In summary, social exclusion can lead to self-threat in various domains like self-regulation, self-control, and even individual’s existence. As a fundamental interpersonal relationship, attribution needs to be re-associated with others when it is threatened. The self-threat caused by the threats in these fields may have an impact on individuals’ subsequent behaviors. Consumers in the experience of social exclusion will purchase specific products through specific consumption decisions in response to the psychological needs. This study focuses on how the social exclusion influences the consumption decisions and their subsequent behaviors when they experience rejection and feel self-threatened.

The choice for products can partially reflect self-characteristic, and have symbolic value to manifest and repair the self. Thus, consumer behavior closely related to self-threat (Mead et al., 2011; Koles et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2022). Previous research has shown that consumers who experienced self-threat from social exclusion will adopt appropriate consumption behaviors to alleviate this self-threat. For example, individuals lacking a sense of belonging may choose nostalgic products (Loveland et al., 2010), warm or comfort food (Troisi and Gabriel, 2011; Wang et al., 2020), luxury or anthropomorphic products (Lee and Shrum, 2012; Mourey et al., 2017), by evoking their sense of contact with the same consumer groups to meet the needs of attribution. By expanding the subject further into the visual appearance of products, this study tries to explore whether the color of products are also effective in reducing self-threat related negative effects.

As one of the most important elements in vision, color is ubiquitous and has specific meanings. With technology advancement and the reduction of manufacturing cost, consumers can choose different colors to match and express their personality. Marketers often use color in advertising, product design, packaging design, brand design, and in-store environment to improve consumers’ evaluation and purchase willingness. The earliest study on color and psychology appeared in 1931 (Gunlach and Macoubrey, 1931). Subsequently, abundant researches were carried out to investigate the relationship between color and consumer behavior as well as the underlying mechanisms. The past decade has witnessed increased interest in research on color and psychological functioning (Babin et al., 2003; Meyers-Levy and Zhu, 2007; Hagtvedt and Brasel, 2016). Color has been applied as an important marketing tool used by businesses, which not only conveys a meaning or message in advertising, but also is capable of getting the attention of individuals. For instance, by using color schemes in stores that don’t clash or overwhelm customers, it is possible to increase the probability of the potential customer purchasing. Color advertising can influence consumers to pay more for products with unnecessary extras, whereas black-and-white advertising gets them to focus on basic product features (Puccinelli et al., 2013).

Interestingly, humans perceive colors as warm and cold regardless of actual temperature, which is related to the dominant wavelength of the color. Colors with longer wavelengths are warm colors (e.g., red, yellow, orange), while those with shorter wavelengths are described as cold (e.g., blue, green, purple). It is reported that color is able to trigger emotional responses to the stimuli in a more subliminal way than text or images. In general, warm colors are regarded as active and stimulating (Valdez and Mehrabian, 1994). Specifically, red is regarded as the warmest color, symbolizing the sun and fire, which creates psychological warmth. It will cause a higher level of awakening and improve attractiveness and competitive performance (Elliot and Maier, 2012). In contrast, blue is considered to be the coldest color, which creates psychological coldness and makes consumers feel more relaxed and calm (Labrecque and Milne, 2012; Elliot and Maier, 2014). In offline environment, cold-color background can decrease the likelihood of postponing purchase compared to warm-color background. Thus, violet/blue interiors will lead to increased purchase intentions than will red/orange interiors. In the auction situation, red background tends to make consumers offer higher price than blue background. However, in the bargaining situation, the red background will make consumers bid lower (Bagchi and Cheema, 2013).

Individuals who experience social exclusion have negative psychological feeling (Williams, 2007), which in turn, drives them to select things that can eliminate their negative psychological experiences. In specific product choices, warm colors create a psychological feeling of warmth, and can compensate for the negative psychological experience of social exclusion. It is reported that warm colors can eliminate negative psychological experiences such as loneliness, and bring positive feelings such as warmth, and pleasure (Elliot and Maier, 2014). In order to eliminate the negative psychological experiences of social exclusion, lowered sense of belongingness, and reduced self-esteem, the excluded would prefer warm colors rather to cold colors. Based on the above analysis, the following hypotheses are proposed.

Self-construal is conceptualized as a “constellation of thoughts, feelings, and actions concerning one’s relationship to others, and self as distinct from others” (Pilarska, 2014). Briefly, it is a way for individuals to recognize and perceive themselves. In general, self-construal can be divided into interdependent self-construal and independent self-construal. Under the stimulation of a certain situation, independent self-constructed individuals tend to exhibit self-centered behavior. However, interdependent self-constructed individuals exhibit more “other-centered” behavior. For them, social identity is particularly important (Trafimow et al., 1991). Maintaining the integrity and closeness of their social network is one of the starting points for their behaviors in daily life. Therefore, interdependent self-constructed individuals are more sensitive in social situations, and prefer to be perceived to be more generous and considerate by others (Lalwani and Shavitt, 2009). As a result, they are more likely to expect harmonious interpersonal relationships, and will be more likely to choose social relationship compensatory products.

The goal of the interdependent selves is to gain social acceptance and maintain one’s social image. Thus, they often take into account the perceptions of others and society when making decisions. On the contrary, the goal of the independent selves is to establish their own uniqueness and differentiation from others, to focus on their own thinking, and to follow their own hearts (Hong and Chang, 2015). They have been accustomed to living or behaving in their own manner, and don’t perceive social harmony as an important element in their life. In other words, they tend to feel it doesn’t matter of being social excluded, for it only means a temporary disconnection of social links. For individuals of interdependence, they feel self-threat by social exclusion, since they desire to be connected to society. Therefore, the following hypotheses are proposed:

In this work, three experiments have been performed to test the proposed hypotheses (see Figure 1). Study 1 is a between-subjects design, aiming to test the basic predictions (H1). Study 2 demonstrates the processing mechanism of these relationships. Finally, Study 3 replicates the findings of Study 2, and shows an important boundary condition of the effect of social exclusion (i.e., interdependent vs. independent). To demonstrate the versatility of findings, we manipulate warm and cold colors using different products (i.e., cellphone, car), and adopt three types of social exclusion scenarios.

By extending the findings of Study 1, Study 2 aims to further investigate the psychological mechanism underlying the social exclusion effect by testing the mediating effect of self-threat, as well as ruling out potential confounds (such as product distinctiveness, emotion).

To further clarify the underlying process, Study 3 investigates the moderating role of self-construal. Besides, to further validate the robustness of our findings, we manipulated social exclusion in a marketing context, where product stimuli was changed into pictures of Airbnb apartments.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

LZ and SW contributed to conception and design of the study. LZ organized the database and wrote the draft of the manuscript. LZ and SD performed the statistical analysis. SW and SD revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.