These are serious considerations when choosing your brand colour palette. Your professional duty is to your brand and company growth, and so your company colours should be chosen not by your favourite niece, or your artistic grandson, but rather by careful study of colour psychology and how it relates to consumer habits in your sector.
At the end of this month I’ll be speak to the topic of “Branding & Marketing” at the Elgin Business Women’s Network’s monthly meeting. I’ll be joined by several great women from the community as we discuss topics related to branding. Two very important themes associated with the design of a brand are typefaces and colours. Since I’ll be delving into more detail about typefaces at the meeting, I’ll save that topic for the audience, so I figured in this column I’d touch on colour.
As you are probably aware but hate to admit, if you are a business owner then whether or not you really, really like green is irrelevant. Your customers associate different colours with different things in a very subconscious way, so your job is to capitalize on this and take advantage of what colour can do for you.
In general, the main colours can be broken down as follows:
RED: Energetic, Youthful. Can also be provoking!
ORANGE: Cheerful, Enthusiastic. Some surveys put it at the least favourite colour but others say it’s yellow…
YELLOW: Optimistic, and Youthful. But also used on hazard warning labels.
GREEN: Peaceful, Natural, Money. Typically used by both “natural” product companies and finance.
BLUE: Trust, Security, Loyalty. Used widely by companies that want to appear traditional and/or reliable. Internationally, it’s the most preferred colour!
PURPLE: Creative, Spiritual. Associated with royalty. Generally not liked by the male gender.
GREY/BLACK: Serious, neutral. Black and white logos can either appear flat and uninteresting or very stylistic and modern.
Obviously there is much more to it than this, and so when putting your branding guidelines together it’s very important to do not take it too lightly, or act impulsively. It’s worth working closely with your designer and relying on their knowledge and any research you’ve done during your business planning stage to determine how your branding should evolve.