The one seemingly small, minute brand element that many companies take for granted is their use of colours. Colours invoke an emotional response. They help dictate how your audience perceives your brand, its products and underlying message.
Strategically positioning the right colours throughout your inbound marketing strategy can mean the difference between captivating an engaging audience and just blending in with the majority.
If your brand has just recently taken off or even if you’re just looking to revamp your design’s focus, then you need to have a thorough understanding of how colours work on a psychological level, and how they can effectively help you attain a stronger sense of brand recognition.
Colours In Marketing and Branding
Some business owners create the illusion that if it looks good, then it is good, and that’s all there is to it. Choosing the right colours for your brand is not so simple.
Colours directly influence mood and impact feelings. Choosing the right colours allows you to invoke an emotion that leads to an action and in the end the goals you’re trying to achieve.
Here’s the psychology of colour and its effects on your business’s branding.
Red
Red is the colour that holds the most power. Red can be used for any number of branding elements and invokes a plethora of different responses.
Red is associated with energy, urgency and excitement. Red can also invoke appetite, which makes sense seeing as how a number of major fast food companies like McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut, strategically use red in their restaurants, logos and advertising.
Red is also commonly used to promote clearance sales and promotional efforts, particularly by clothing stores, which due to the fact that reddish-orange is very appealing to impulse shopper’s.
But red isn’t all good. It can also translate to represent danger and warning, and so your brand’s use of red should be applied sparingly and strategically, unless, of course, you’re looking for hungry customer’s.
Blue
Blue is another popular colour that has the ability to instill a sense of peace, trust and security. It also has the ability to indirectly kill the customer’s appetite, so you won’t see too much blue in the fast food industry.
Because it can invoke reliability and trust, blue is utilised mostly by small businesses, banks and a handful of popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Green
Green is associated with nature, health, wealth and power.
So green is obviously used by most brands who have anything to do with energy or the environment. John Deere tractor and equipment company is a great example of a brand using green for nature and power. The yellow contrasting also helps further instill the company’s nature element.
Green is also soothing and the easiest colour for the human eye to process. Use green when you want to provoke a sense of harmony and relaxation.
Yellow
Optimism is the best word to describe the emotional responses invoked by yellow. Yellow has the ability to catch the eye quicker than any other colour, even red.
Companies use yellow when they want to catch the consumer’s eye as it helps incite the impulse buyers, so you can easily find it in sales and clearance campaigns tailored to window shopper’s.
Happiness, enlightenment and warmth are a few other emotions invoked by yellow.
Contrast For Conversions
So now that you have a rough idea of the colours you plan to use in your design and marketing efforts, you also need to understand the how to effectively use colour coordination, which can have a massive impact on your conversion rates.
The right colour coordination can invoke what’s called the Isolation Effect, which basically means that if something sticks out, then people are more likely to take note and remember that item, even if it is only in their subconscious.
The Isolation Effect is a psychological principle that you should try to apply to every web page and design element associated with your online brand. But this doesn’t need to be a daunting task, all you need to do is look at a colour wheel and strategically use colours that are opposite of each other.
This forces your message to stand out and demands the viewer take notice. For example, your call to action buttons, banners or boxes need to contrast with the rest of the page’s colour scheme. This can be applied to all marketing channels, such as on your site’s homepage, landing page, social media profiles, forum interactions, etc.
Apart from knowing the psychology of each colour and using the Isolation Effect, you also need to take into account the meaning of each colour through the lens of different cultures.
While green is used to represent wealth and tranquility in North America, it represents corruption in Africa and adultery in China. So if your brand is global and you create content for specific countries, make sure you’re using colours that don’t accidentally offend an entire nation.
The psychology of colour and its effects on your audience need to be taken into account constantly. For every new product you roll out, new country you service, and for every shift in brand or marketing direction, take your use of colours back to the drawing board and uncover the most optimal colour combinations for your business’s current marketing strategy.
Not sure about your brand’s current use of colour? Need help finding the perfect colour combinations? Feel free to contact us right away for more information.
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