Marketing

Packages for manufactured articles must be designed very carefully: for a product to be successful, it must appeal to a wider, even global audience. This is where marketing comes in: it includes the research of attitudes of a wide range of nationalities & cultures towards a product, going towards making it successful.
The use of colour is an important part of packaging.

The colours for the package of washing powder for example, must give the idea of cleansing or freshness.

Who would have thought that designing the packaging for a worldwide product would turn out to be an ordeal in Europe alone?

You see, the colours representing freshness in Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece) are white and blue, in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Hungary) it's green.

The reason for this?

People in southern Europe are strongly influenced by the colours of the sea i.e the Mediterranean or Atlantic, since they are directly connected to it. Countries in Central and Eastern Europe have no connection to it. For them the lush green fields would represent the idea of freshness, contrasting greatly with Southern countries, which are more arid (the predominant land colours would be yellow and brown).

(curtesy of scienceblogs.com and gettyimages)