When I was a child I remember my mother taking me to the grocery store. I vividly remember feeling a strong magnetic emotional reaction to color, kid's colors, primary colors like red, blue, green, and yellow. That day in the store my mind was reacting to something in the kitchen utensils aisle. There were some red handles and some brightly colored objects in one small area of the aisle -things to help around the kitchen.
These objects were not being marketed to me, at age 6. So the magnetism toward the color in this case conflicted with my mind's expectation that, since the colors were made for me, there must be toys up there, or something fun.
No such luck.
We react to things (digital media, logos, packaging etc.) in every day life in very specific ways. First one sees color; the color itself creates an emotional reaction. Secondly, people see shape, and in the nanoseconds of human understanding, before the mind is able to read or form thoughts around words, we react to shape. Finally, people read word forms. Then, each person forms their own version of what that word or two means to them, and compares it to the emotional reaction they just had to the color and shape.
Does it all add up? Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.
The moral of the grocery story is that you don't want to confuse your customers. You want to plan the colors and shapes and words to suit people's expectations.
We can examine the brightly colored utensils further. Perhaps the company that manufactures these brightly colored devices chose to market their products to parents who cook at home, and who would likely be drawn, by the gentle tug of their children's leaning, to buy their stuff. In many cases the parent shares much of the same life environment as the child and may have recent associations with those primary colors. Has the product's manufacturer planned the association? Or has the tool-maker learned by trial and error that red egg-beaters sell better than black ones for some reason.
A better example: There was a blizzard the other day here in Chicago. I was driving down Bryn Mar, between Lincoln and Western and I almost blew right through the stop sign. I jammed on the breaks and slowly slid into the intersection. Luckily no one was there for me to crash into. This is a classic case of the color, shape, word sequence breaking down. The stop sign was gray and white, since it was completely covered with Chicago snow, so it took me just-that-much longer to recognize because I had to rely on just the shape of the sign to remind me to stop. There were no words available. Stop signs are red for a reason. Red means stop, octogon means stop, and STOP means stop, in that order.