The Psychology of color in branding and marketing is one of the most fascinating and engaging aspects because humans are visual creatures, and colors influence them a lot on people’s buying decisions.
For example, do you feel calm when surrounded by green fields and blue skies? And do you sense alarmed when you see a red signal light? Yes, because of these facts’ – we consider colors the mother tongue of the subconscious. The color visuals can effectively influence people’s behavior in the context or product within a few instants or moments. This same psychology plays an essential role in digital marketing and branding.
In this blog, we list you with facts and reasons about colors in the marketing industry and how to apply them to your small business.
What is Color Psychology?Importance of color psychology in the marketing industryColor psychology is the study of colors and their connection with human behavior. The study aims to determine how color creates an impact on our daily activities. Thus, understanding color psychology will let the audience know about the service/product. At the same time, mishandling the colors without prior knowledge can create a negative impact on your audience.
Leading (successful) businesses learn and implement color psychology to influence a consumer’s brand experience.
On seeing your product packaging, logo, and website design, your target audience should know who you are and what is about your product or service. Understanding color phycology is crucial because the right color can,
1. Show off your brand personality.
2. Impact brand memorability by 80%.
3. Set the tone for products to the customers.
4. Imply brand perceptions of your consumers’ minds.
5. Effectively grab attention and convey meaning.
6. Create an interest to your customers towards your brand.
7. Make you stand out from the crowd.
8.Influence your brand performance.
We conclude with an example of the YouTube logo. As we can see, YouTube has a red color icon with a white button that compels viewers to press. Further, the red color conveys the meaning of excitement and cheerfulness of watching videos on YouTube. The excellently chosen red color with white color button create brand memorability, grab attention, and convey the meaning perfectly to their target customers.
How could color influence your brand and marketing?
1.Red Color
The red color grabs attention. Hence marketing industry uses red to convey – a range of meanings such as excitement, passion, danger, energy, and action. E.g., The call-to-action button on the website with red color can induce people to click that button than any other color.
2.Green Color
Green color signifies freshness, health, and relaxation importantly connected to nature. The color evokes the feeling of tranquility and serenity. Hence brands associated with natural cosmetics brands and eco-friendly fashion brands prefer green color to promote their brand.
3.Orange Color
Orange is the color of cheerful youthfulness, liveliness, energy, adventure, extroversion, creativity, and optimism. Hence the fitness, tech, and logistics use orange color the most. Handle orange with care while designing to avoid making the end design visually overwhelming.
4.Pink Color
Pink is associated with femineity, warm as well as modern. Companies use pink to add a luxury touch to their products. Hence baby girl toys are in beautiful pink color packages. Diversely, pink is a color of empathy and sensitivity, making it a perfect color for hospital-related products.
5.Blue Color
Blue is trustable, dependable, reliable, and responsible. Since it can bring peace majorly, the marketing industry uses blue color to encourage building relationships with their clients. Hence many big brands such – as PayPal, Dell, Facebook, Visa, and HP use the blue color in their logo.
6.White Color
White symbolizes simplicity, hygiene, peace, innocence, and purity. Further, white on a black background can personify purity and a new start. Hence tech, health, and wellness industries use white. Even Jobs choose white as he knew it goes well with beautifully designed products.
7.Black Color
Want your product to look sleek, modern, and luxurious? Then go for the color black that symbolizes sophistication, power, and control. Hence play a substantial role in the automotive, finance, and fashion industry, for example, Adidas.
8.Purple Color
Purple is the color of royalty and radiates a warm and refreshing nature. Hence popular among fashion brands like Hallmark, Syfy, Twitch, Aussie, and Viber. Regarding the marketing industry, marketers use this color to represent creativity, mystery, and regeneration.
9.Brown Color
Brown is an earthly color. Hence organic, wood, and leather products use brown to convey their brand message to their target customers. Brown is the most favorite color in living room arrangement, clothing irrespective for both the men and women.
10.Yellow Color
The color yellow represents optimism, youthfulness, and clarity. Since yellow is more perspective to babies, many of the baby products and toys come in yellow. Further, yellow is favorable, visible, and draws more attention, for example, IKEA, DHL, Nikon, and McDonald’s.
A single-color concept is no longer going to suit any business and a lot of implementing and testing needed to identify a perfect color for your business.
Before choosing the color, understand the character of your brand. Understanding the personality can help you select the apt color for effectively representing your brand/service to your customers.
You can follow the below cheat sheet to find one for your business. The product is for
1.Masculine/Feminine
Pink represents feminine products, and brown is the color of ruggedness and masculinity
2.Affordable/Luxurious
Purple is the color of royalty. Yellow is the color of warmth and cheerfulness.
3.Classic/Modern
Gray adds classic and genuine nature. Want to look more modern? Then choose black.
4.Natural/Processed
No doubt, green is the color of nature. Red goes well with packaged food.
5.Mature/Youthful
Orange is a youthful color, and Gray is the color that represents mature features.
5.Leisure/Fun
The childlike pallet makes things less intimidating and fit for creative and fun-filled products.
The described colors with their characteristics are just a sample of how color represents one brand. There are 10 million shades available, and care must take while choosing the color to represent your brand. Since color can make, and at the same time, shake the bottom line of any company or service. Consequently, on building your brand around color, choose a color to represent your brand, and then consistently apply the shade to your logo, advertising, and website design. In that way, you can build trust, brand remembrance, and reliability among your clients.
Final ThoughtsToday’s marketing industry has become more competitive, and hence every marketer should come up with all possible methods to generate leads. Besides, color psychology matches a wide range of marketing industries such as restaurants, beverages, automotive, electronics, locomotives, real-estates, and other manufacturers.
A subtle change in the color scheme with arrangement and distribution can influence the overall lead generation, sales, and brand loyalty. Henceforth every business should test and choose the color that goes well with its brand purpose to – create a positive impact on their customers and eventually the sales.
PostScriptNext time, when you go shopping, ask yourself why you are trusting this product or service so much. You may provide multiple reasons, but in the heart, color preference is one of the prime reasons that nudge you to choose that product/service over others.