Color Red for Positive Numerical Values in eccomerce site?

Question

Company I am currently with wants to use red for positive values because it reflects their brand colors. I opposed using red because it associated with sale items or negative numbers. Any thoughts? or know any articles I can reference.

Answer 1

Your company's (marketing, design?) leaders assume that users will notice (and appreciate) the exceptions (breaking of conventions) for your brand. 99% of your users time will most likely be spent on other sites, and will be used to those conventions.

You're right to point out the conventional use of red.

Jakob Nielsen (from the Nielsen Norman Group) has a short video about Jakob's Law of Internet User Experience:

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design for patterns for which users are accustomed.

I'm not aware of the domain of your website, but if it's dealing with performance metrics, this would be in direct contrast to conventions.

Red as seen in performance indicators:

While red and green can be problematic with color alone (some users are color blind), when paired with an icon, it is a standard for performance indicators and to use red for down (negative).

From Google Analytics:

Yahoo Finance

Bloomberg

Answer 2

First of all, it depends in which context use red color(grid, text, graph).

If we have few colors and one of them is close to green then we will have classic situation: green - positive value, red - negative. But for example, we have table and all numbers in black or gray but positive in red in this case we highlight positive values not negative.

Also, big impact has background (white or black)