The Impact Color Has on Brand Integrity

Let’s say you’re a fan of the color pink. It’s a great shade for your wardrobe, home, and car. Your choice of pink as the primary hue for your brand’s logo may thus appear to be perfect — except that it likely isn’t.

Instead of being spontaneous and impulsive, you should think carefully about what you want your brand’s identity to represent before settling on a color scheme that includes pink. If your brand possesses specific characteristics or embodies a certain outlook, pink might be an appropriate color. But if it doesn’t possess those traits, pink could be a particularly poor choice.

Introducing Color Psychology

Your brand’s values, principles, and aspirations should permeate everything associated with it. Because of its impact on consumers’ minds and hearts, color is an integral aspect of every successful brand’s identity. The field of study known as color psychology examines the psychological effects of color on viewers. Insights from color psychology can be used to inform your company’s approach to visual branding.

Why does color psychology matter?

Your brand’s identity, products, and services can all be conveyed to your target audience via the use of color.

Consider these fascinating truths about how colors affect sales:

1. Informed color choice can boost brand identification by as much as 80%.

2. Customers form snap opinions about products in under a minute, and research shows that 60% to 90% of those opinions are based on color alone.

3. Roughly 90% of buyers take into consideration a brand’s color palette before making a purchase.

Still not convinced? Soft drink Fanta’s logo has evolved throughout the years, but the brand’s signature blue type on an orange backdrop has remained constant. This might lead one to ask, why orange? The answer is that orange represents life, love, youth, and energy. Different hues could easily be used in the same pattern, but they would lack the vitality and enthusiasm of orange.

Revealing True Colors (and Characters)

Now more than ever, the names of well-known companies are tied to certain hues; thus, the way your brand is represented visually is crucial to its perception in the marketplace. Starbucks’ white and green logo represents exclusivity, whereas Coca-Cola’s red and white colors represent love, togetherness, family, and nostalgia. By using the right hues, new businesses are able to stand out and make an impression on their target market.

Let’s take a look at how certain familiar colors make us feel:

• The color blue is popular among financial institutions, healthcare businesses, and technology behemoths because of the sense of security, peace, and harmony it offers to the viewer. Brands like Facebook, Oral-B, Visa, and Dell are all big users of blue.

• Businesses that use green, like John Deere, Animal Planet, and Whole Foods, are often connected with pleasant ideas like nature, prosperity, expansion, and good health.

• Pink conveys an air of sophistication because of the luxury it conveys with its feminine, youthful, vibrant, warm, and modern overtones. Examples of brands that use pink include Barbie and Victoria’s Secret.

• The color red, which represents love, passion, energy, power, and excitement, is often used in the health, retail, and food industries. Coke, YouTube, and Target are three companies that use red prominently in their logos.

• Orange is often used in the fields of fitness, logistics, and technology to symbolize excitement, adventure, sociability, and creativity. Orange is favored by the brands Fanta, Timberland, and Amazon.

• The color yellow is popular in the health and technology industries because it’s both uplifting and welcoming. Companies like Snapchat, Ikea, and McDonald’s all use yellow in their logos.

• In the world of technology and design, the color purple is a symbol of quality, uniqueness, and reliability. Popular brands that use purple in their identities include Hallmark and Twitch.

• In the fields of technology, health, and wellness, the color white represents purity, chastity, simplicity, hygiene, calm, and friendliness. Cartoon Network, Mini (the compact automobile), and L’Oréal are examples of brands that use white in their identities.

• In the worlds of fashion, transportation, and finance, black is synonymous with high-end sophistication, opulence, power, strength, and glamour. Disney, Prada, and Nike all make distinctive use of black in their logos.

Connecting Color and Business

According to studies, several industries have their own preferred color palettes. Over 60% of retail brands — but not fashion trademarks — use red, according to research on market color differences conducted by researchers Lauren Labrecque and George Milne. More than 75% of all credit card logos are blue, and this color is also widely used in the pharmaceutical, travel, electronic, health, beauty, and home goods industries. Companies in the Fortune 500 are most likely to use the color blue, followed by red, green, yellow, and black. While pink is also common, purple is not.

How to Choose the Perfect Brand Color

So how do you choose brand colors using insights gained from color psychology?

The most important aspect of brand consistency is maintaining the same color scheme across all mediums. You should first hire a creative agency to put together a brand style guide and then use it to produce uniform content for your website and printed materials.

The definition of a brand’s personality is the representation of clear objectives with a corresponding feeling or tone. For instance, do you want your product to be associated with a quality of vitality or authority? Finding the right color scheme for your company can be easier if you’re able to answer some of these questions in advance.

Get to Know Your Customers

Create in-depth buyer personas to learn about your target market’s demographics and psychographics. By selecting appropriate hues, you can significantly boost customer engagement with your brand.

Examine the logos, colors, and designs of competitors to identify commonalities and opportunities for your brand to stand out.

In order to establish a unique brand identity, it’s better to think outside the box than to copy market leaders.

Solicit opinions on your proposed logos and colors via social media, email surveys, and other methods for customer input. Color selections can be enhanced by learning what your customers truly desire. Colors can help communicate with your target market and increase brand awareness if they’re utilized effectively.