Guest Post – Colour Psychology and Branding: What You Need To Know

Your brand is your business! Consumers don’t make buying decisions based on quality and price alone. 

Faced with a choice between multiple, similar products, they’ll pick the one from the brand they identify with most. Which means your brand’s voice, values and visual style need to appeal to your target audience. And one of the most effective ways to connect with them is through colour. 

Research shows that colour is the most recognisable feature of a brand. It’s what consumers notice first and what they remember most about a business that they know.

Don’t believe me? Here are the facts…

Why you should care about it, in 4 facts

1. It takes the subconscious up to 90 seconds to make a judgement about an environment or product and 62-90% of that judgement is driven by colour
2. Societies have ‘favourite’ colours. In 2015, the UK’s favourite colour was blue 
3. The meaning a colour has is culturally specific. Red can mean danger, love, luck or beauty, depending on the nationality of the person you ask
4. People prefer to read information that’s presented in colour and understand more of what’s written when it is

So we know it’s important to use colour. But is it enough to just pick some you like or take cues from others in your industry? Not really.

Your brand colours have to strike a chord with your specific audience. Which brings me to…

Picking the right colours for your business

Whether you’re just starting out, in the middle of a rebrand, or creating new assets for an existing brand, you need to ask yourself some questions. 

To uncover the colours that will work for your audience, ask yourself, is my brand more…

• Masculine or feminine?
• Youthful or mature?
• Loud or meek?
• Luxurious or affordable?
• Playful or serious?
• Rugged or sophisticated?
• Modern or traditional?

These questions define your brand’s personality. And it’s this that should drive your colour choices. 

Your answers to the above will sit somewhere on a scale between more or less of each trait. The extremes of which correspond to specific colours. For example, black represents luxury and yellow affordability. We’ve highlighted these extremes in the infographic below.

Use it as a reference to help you create your colour palette.

Once you have an idea of how your brand’s personality translates into colour, use a tool like Adobe Color to find palettes that follow well-established matching rules, or browse potential palettes in Colors.Co.

Embedded from UKWebHostReview

About the author

Jodie is a Conversion Copywriter, Content Strategist and Optimisation Specialist working with bold B2B SaaS and tech brands. Before founding This Copy Sticks, she spent a decade selling the toughest value proposition around and raised £2 million for charities before her 25th birthday. After 10 years in fundraising, she decided to put her words to work helping tech-mad trailblazers grow their businesses.