What Color Should Your Brand Be?

Therefore, what color should your brand be?

To affirm it, you’ll want to become knowledgeable on the matter:

Brand colors consist of a pallet of around two to ten colors used to represent a company. A brand can boost recognizability and awareness by strategically applying them.

Some of the primary implementations for brand colors consist of a company’s logo, social media channels, business cards, or even uniforms for brick-and-mortar stores.

There are abundant reasons why brands use them, with the following key factors:

• Mood. Colors significantly influence our ‘emotions’ when applied to the correct brand and product/service. By means of its own application, it’s commonly known that McDonald’s red and yellow branding generally makes us feel hungrier.
• Perception. Is the brand innovative, serious, or fun? When assessed, a company may choose to opt for colors that reflect these moods if the product/service fits them. A good example is Coca-Cola, with its red branding enticing excitement.
• Recognition. It helps with discerning the brand, the morals, and the products/services they offer. For instance, e-scooters are now in 626 cities worldwide and in 53 countries, but what color are they usually? Well, bright green, of course.

Colors are well known to have an impact on our emotions towards a brand. However, it might not be as spectacular as color psychology suggests.

Color psychology in business: myth or reality?

Color psychology in business studies how specific colors affect the behaviors and perceptions of an audience. Therefore, in graphic design and branding, it is utilized to connect brands with emotion.

Because of detailed studies like “impact of color on marketing,” people still firmly agree with this psychology when developing marketing assets, new businesses, or rebranding.

The color emotion guide that many refer to is the below:

The truth in this matter is that color is too dependent on personal experience to always conjure target emotions. Research even shows that experiences, upbringing, cultural differences, and personal preferences change the effect individual colors have on consumers.

Therefore, it eliminates the certainty that a blue brand color automatically translates a company’s trustworthiness in our brains.

What matters most is offering colors that represent the brand and product/services in their most authentic light.

How to choose the right brand colors for your product/business

Above, we quickly identified that choosing colors or pallets solely based on color psychology is an outdated practice.

“What color should your brand be?”

Well, it’s difficult to answer without any background knowledge of the brand itself — however, it’s not impossible.

The best brand colors usually follow a color scheme, with the primary four being Monochromatic, Analogous, Complementary, and Triad.

These use the canonical color wheel to match a scheme that is proven to partner colors properly. This may appear something like those shown below:

Instead of using the color emotion chart to select the brand’s design, you may want to select a scheme above and then apply the four-step guide below:

• Plan on selecting 3 colors. If you’re new to graphic design and branding, don’t overthink your options. To prevent this from happening, plan on choosing up to three colors. Three is optimal for most color schemes, but other options like monochrome will also need a variety of hues.
• Choose a base. The base color is commonly referred to as the personality color. Therefore, it should reflect the brand’s most dominant personality trait and also appeal to the target audience you’re trying to reach. Afterwards, the accent and neutral colors you select will be chosen based on how well they match the base.
• Pick an accent. With a base color, you’ll use this the most within the content. When it comes to the accent, this will be the second most used color. To choose one, ensure that it matches well with the base color while simultaneously reflecting your brand’s personality.
• Select a neutral. A neutral color is commonly the background color; something that’s used to avoid attention and allow the base or accent to stand out. Most neutral colors are hues of whites, grays, blacks, and beiges. Just be sure to choose a neutral that doesn’t distract from your base and accent.

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In deciding what color(s) your brand should be, you need to also think about how you want consumers to perceive the company. To gain a further understanding of how other brands have done this, review the examples below:

Examples of well-known brand colors

Without colors, there are no brands. Since their inception, brands have continuously optimized colors based on their product/services and target audience for better engagement and more revenue.

As companies utilize these colors, they can easily become attached to the brand — for example, red and Coca-Cola. Having this offers an enormous competitive advantage as it achieves instant recognition.

To learn how other brands choose their colors, see below:

Vodafone

With the ability of graphic design excellence, Vodafone has created a brand that’s recognizable worldwide.

How they’ve approached this is by incorporating their logo design and services in a simple-to-understand format.

To begin with, the icon on the logo is a speech symbol representing communication, and the branding color red represents bold sound, dialogue, and passion.

When merged, they represent the brand perfectly with a concise message.

Starbucks

Love it or hate it, Starbucks is known everywhere because of their unique marketing tactics. The colors used in their branding are primarily green and white.

Because coffee comes from nature, they’ve utilized the color green to showcase freshness and vitality. The neutral white acts more as a background color and helps bring out the boldness of the green.

Facebook

The branding behind Facebook has a unique story, as the founder, Mark Zuckerberg, didn’t follow any color scheme conventions. Instead, he used blue because he was colorblind, and it was the most prominent color he could see.

Despite this, the color blue represents the brand in its intended form as it typically showcases optimism and purity — a quality they wished to convey.

Conclusion

With the provided information, you should now have a more in depth understanding of how to select a proper brand color.

Without question, it isn’t an easy task, and you should take your time when choosing a color scheme right for you.

If you’d like help with this, consider scheduling a call or ordering a design from us today.

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