Psychology of Colour: How To Use Colour In Your Branding

What Is Colour Psychology?

Colour psychology, to put it simply, is the study of how different colours can have an effect on our emotions, perception, and behaviour. An incredibly powerful tool that can evoke a wide range of feelings and reactions in people, colour can be used to influence someone’s mood or attitude within an instant. Whether you’re aware of it or not, the clothes you wear, items you buy, and companies you opt to invest your money and time into have a lot to do with colours. Colour psychology is used in a range of fields such as marketing, advertising, design, and architecture, with organisations of all levels using it to create brand identities and shape consumer behaviour. 

Any company will need to figure out what their target audience is before they can start branding or advertising, as only then can they begin to delve deeper into what that demographic actually wants. Colour psychology is a multidisciplinary area that is sometimes controlled by factors including culture and personal experiences. However, a lot of meaning we can derive from colour is universal as they have an effect on our brain. Using the graphic below, we can see the most common colours and what meanings we can draw from them.

How To Use Colour Psychology in Your Business

Once you’ve got a good understanding of what each colour means, you can then examine how to apply it to your business. It can be a good idea to seek inspiration from your competitors and try to understand why they’ve used certain colours within their business, whilst avoiding making yours a carbon copy, as you could become unoriginal. As mentioned previously, establishing your target market is a key place to start, as then you can create a brand that has a better chance of attracting a large number of customers. Combining the primary audience you’re aiming for with the industry you’re in will give you a rough understanding of what colour would work best. 

Consistency Is Key

It is important to be consistent once you’ve picked a colour scheme, creating a logo and continuing it through your social media, advertising, and other details. Whilst this doesn’t need to be a singular colour that is used in every piece of content you create, it should be in most as this will make your business more recognisable to the masses. Becoming memorable may be an obvious idea, but getting it right can be slightly more complex. This doesn’t mean that you have to use bright colours and intriguing artwork to grab attention, as then you could be attracting the wrong type of people and pushing your target market away from your business. Instead, focus on the specific industry you’re in, who your customers will primarily be, and what you want them to feel when they see your logo, advertisement, or store. 

Many apparel or car companies will choose neutral colours such as black, white, or silver as their logo, allowing them to seamlessly integrate into on top of multiple shades. This is also an attempt to appeal to the masses and not corner themselves into one or a few demographics. In contrast, fast food or toy companies will often use bright yellow and red colouring to grab attention, whether that’s with signage, their website, or packaging. Sitting somewhere in the middle of these two ideologies are businesses that have blue, green, or purple in their imagery as they might want to come across as dependable. This is applied in many cases by technological and healthy food establishments. Whilst this certainly isn’t a rule, you can examine why companies would use certain colours and their intentions behind it.

Top Tips To Remember When Using Colour for Your Branding

1.    Gain an understanding of what each colours mean and how they affect the brain.
2.    Work out what your primary target audience is.
3.    Figure out what your brand identity is and choose colours that align with your message. 
4.    Think about the industry you’re in, using competition as inspiration.
5.    Use certain colours when marketing or advertising, e.g. red in a sale creates urgency.
6.    Use colours to create a specific atmosphere or mood in or around your business.
7.    Be consistent with colour in your branding and advertising.

Fanta

Fanta, part of the Coca-Cola group, is really interesting to analyse when it comes to the colours they use. For most people, the first colour associated with the brand is orange, despite this only taking up the background of their logo. This might be partly due to that their most notorious flavour of drink is orange and completely circumstantial. But it can also be because it is linked to happiness, joy, and socialisation; emotions that they instantly want you to symbolise with their brand. The font used in their logo is a navy blue that is representative of trust and stability, with a multi-shaded green leaf sitting above this to evoke images of nature. Bringing these three colours together with a white border to the typography, you get a good idea of how Coca-Cola want to make you feel when you think about Fanta. If you take a look at their recent marketing campaign, you will see none of this colour on their logo or new product whatsoever, but instead a black and white theme. This is because the campaign is based on enticing the consumer to guess what their new flavour is. This makes a lot of sense to remove the colours on their packaging as it creates a sense of mystery and drama around the product, luring potential customers in.

Apple

Excluding their very first logo, which was a tribute to Isaac Newton and looked more suitable for a beer company, Apple’s logo has remained the exact same in shape from 1977 to the current day. What has changed? The colour. The first creation of the recognisable bit into Apple was created in a multi-coloured design, but was changed when they were losing money rapidly and at risk of closing. Apple wanted to be seen as more of a luxury brand and changed it to plain black, a stark contrast to what it used to be. Since then, it has changed three more times, ending up with the grey or silver design we see nowadays. It was hugely important to Apple’s success that they made this change to the colour of their logo, as it helped build trust with their customers. The multi-coloured design didn’t work for what they were trying to sell, as it made them appear childish and unreliable. After deciding they wanted to be a more luxurious brand, the muted colour scheme has worked a treat, earning millions of loyal customers who continuously put their faith in the technological company. Without them even having to alter the logo’s shape at all, they’ve managed to build a reputation as one of the most recognisable and reputable brands in the world simply with a change of colour.

Conclusion

When you’re using colour in your business, it is vital that you tap into the mind of your customers and guide them to feel a certain way. You should also consider what you’re actually creating. For example, if you’ve got an informative leaflet, you might want to use more relaxing colours compared to if you were having a sale, where you’d want to create a sense of urgency on an advertising board. If you have an establishment, your colour scheme can have a massive effect on the mood, with reds being ideal for creating energy in a diner setting, whereas blues are more calming and are more suited to a spa. Getting the colouring right for your business will have a huge impact on whether it’s a success or not, affecting the customer's opinion subconsciously in either a positive or negative way.