Color Your World: How Color Affects Your Brand

Since we don’t walk around in a black and white world, we thought we would talk to you a bit about color and the importance of color with your brand identity.

Color creates emotion, triggers memory and gives a sensation.

Not only that, it expresses personality, stimulates brand association and accelerates differentiation.

Consumers depend upon similarities.  Take Coca-Cola and Tiffany’s for example.  The colors of these two companies are very distinctive.  You don’t need a can to identify Coke’s trademark red or read the type on a gift box in order to know where that gift was purchased.  We see color and a set of impressions comes to us.

Color creates emotion, triggers memory and gives a sensation.

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In the sequence of visual perception, the brain reads color after it registers a shape and before it reads the content.  Choosing a color for a new identity requires a core understanding of color theory, a clear vision of how the brand needs to be perceived and differentiated, and an ability to master consistency and meaning over a broad range of media.

Color is used in many purposes.  Some colors are used to unify an identity while other colors may be used to clarify brand architecture through differentiating products or business lines. 

Traditionally, the primary brand color is assigned to the brand symbol and the secondary color is assigned to the logotype, business descriptor, or tagline.  Families of colors are developed to support a broad range of communication needs.  Ensuring optimum reproduction of the brand color is an integral element of standards, and part of the challenge of unifying colors across packaging, printing, signage, and electronic media.

Some color brand identity basics are:

• Use color to facilitate recognition and build brand equity.
• Colors have different connotations in different cultures.  Be sure to do your research.
• Color is affected by various reproduction methods.  Color needs to be tested in different mediums.
• An experienced designer is the ultimate resource for setting color consistency across platforms.  Designers have the experience to get through this hard process.
• Ensuring consistency across applications is frequently a challenge.
• Remember that not everyone uses they type of computer that you are using (either a Mac or PC), and they may be viewing your branding on multiple different devices such as tablets and smart phones.  Testing must be done on different platforms for consistency.
• Sixty percent of the decisions to buy a product are based on color.
• You can never know enough about color.  Depend on your basic color theory knowledge: warm/cool; values/hues; tints/shades; complimentary colors/contrasting colors.
• Quality ensures that your brand identity asset is protected.

A Brand’s colors are used to support a broad range of communication needs.

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Professional graphic designers are skilled in color theory and the importance that color plays a role in business.   They can help you choose the right color that can level the playing field between large and small businesses.