When you walk through the doors of a store, everything is done to make you buy as many products as possible. You haven’t learned anything yet. On the other hand, we don’t always suspect the techniques that are used to push customers to buy certain products rather than others and to push them to buy several copies of the same product.
Sure, we know the classic promotions, but there is also a little “trick” less known but just as formidable that is used by some stores: the little red net around fruits and vegetables. You have probably already noticed that oranges, mandarins or other citrus fruits are wrapped in small colored nets. Often red. There is a very specific reason.
German scientist Karl R. Gegenfurtner, a professor of psychology at the University of Giessen in Germany, has been interested in this phenomenon. And his study, published in the scientific magazine i-Perception and relayed by our colleagues at Laatste Nieuws, revealed that the nets were used to attract our attention and make us believe that oranges that are not yet ripe are ripe. This is an optical illusion.
“We are talking about colour assimilation, a phenomenon that was first studied in the 19th century. And which has now found its way to supermarkets,” adds Durk Talsma, professor of psychology at Ghent University, to our colleagues in the north of the country.
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In the case of oranges and the red net, our eyes and brain will naturally make an “average” of the different colors that appear. And it is the red color, predominant, that will be retained and imposed on the entire product. The oranges will therefore look more “red” and therefore riper, when they are not necessarily so. “The finer the mesh of the net, the stronger the effect,” continues the psychologist.
