Basics of Branding: Lecture 4
Color in branding
Studies have found that a brand’s colors affect more than 60% of a customer’s purchasing decision.
Understanding the psychology of color can help your brand establish trust and familiarity by evoking the right emotions.
The psychology/emotion associated with various colors:
- Red: Increases your heart rate, makes you breath faster. It is associated with energy, excitement, passion, and urgency. Brands like Coca-Cola and Netflix effectively use red to convey excitement and grab attention.
- Purple: It is a mysterious color, often associated with elegance, royalty, luxury, spirituality, and magic. Brands like Hallmark and Cadbury use purple to suggest sophistication and quality.
- Blue: Puts people at ease. Associated with trust, security, confidence, and stability. Many financial institutions (e.g., IBM, Facebook) use blue to build a sense of reliability.
- Green: Gives a feeling of freshness. Associated with health, peace, serenity, nature, and growth. Starbucks and Whole Foods leverage green to emphasize natural and organic qualities.
- Yellow: Associated with the sun, warmth, happiness, positivity, and optimism. Brands like McDonald’s and Snapchat use yellow to create a cheerful and friendly image.
- Orange: Mixes the brightness and positivity of yellow with the excitement and passion of red. It evokes an adventurous, enthusiastic, and creative feeling. Nickelodeon and Fanta use orange for a playful vibe.
- Brown: Provides feelings of grounded simplicity, earthiness, and reliability. Associated with classical, trustworthy, and rugged qualities. UPS uses brown to convey dependability.
- Black: Classic and sophisticated. Often associated with power, luxury, formality, and modernity. Works well with high-end products and can be combined with other colors to create a stronger emotion (e.g., Chanel, Apple).
- White: Simplicity, purity, cleanliness, and minimalism. Can also be associated with feelings of trust and new beginnings. Often used as a background or to create a sense of spaciousness.
It’s also important to note that color perceptions can vary significantly across different cultures. What might be positive in one culture could be negative in another, so always consider your target audience’s cultural context.
Building your brand color scheme
While there’s no hard and fast rules here, let’s talk about some guidelines that can help you in getting to a color scheme that fits your brand:
Plan to choose 3 colors: A base color, an accent color, and a neutral. These three roles help create visual balance and hierarchy in your brand’s visual communications.
Choose your base color: Your base color should be the dominant color, representative of your brand’s strongest features and primary emotional message. It needs to appeal most broadly to your target audience and often aligns with the core psychological associations discussed above.
Choose your accent color: This will be the color used most after the base color, designed to draw attention to key elements or calls to action. It needs to visually pair well with your base color. Consider using color theory concepts like complementary (opposite on the color wheel for high contrast) or analogous (next to each other for harmony) schemes. Online color scheme generators (e.g., Adobe Color, Coolors) can be invaluable tools for exploring options based on your base color.
Choose your neutral color: The neutral color will most likely be used for backgrounds, text, or to provide visual breathing room. Typically, these are shades of grey, beiges, or whites. Neutrals are crucial for enhancing readability and allowing your base and accent colors to stand out effectively.
Just remember - these are not hard and concrete rules. Be open to experiment and see what color schemes fit well for your brand. Always test your chosen color palette with your target audience to ensure it evokes the desired perceptions.