The Color Semantics of Compact Car: A Case Study on Ford Focus.

The compact car market is gradually subdivided, and the trend of exterior color diversification is obvious. The semantics conveyed by automobile appearance has an important impact on consumers’ personalized choice, and color plays a vital role in the formation of automobile appearance semantics on the basis of automobile modeling. This paper aims to analyze the subjective feelings of potential consumers on compact cars’ exterior colors and find out the semantics of each color. This study is conducted under the framework of Kansei Engineering, using the semantic differential method. 70 participants were evaluated subjectively on Ford Focus of different colors. The results show that the subjective feelings of users are related to the exterior color, and different exterior colors have different semantic tendencies. This study provides a more scientific basis for the choice of car’s exterior color, and can guide automobile enterprises to formulate color schemes for different target consumer groups.