The right color is appropriate for your brand The good news: Research into the psychology of color can help you make the right choice. It’s the feeling, mood, and image that your brand or product creates that matters. The context you’re working within is an essential consideration. It’s a frustrating answer, but it’s the truth. While it would be nice to be able to simply look at an infographic and make the right decision, the reality is that the answer to “What colors are right for my brand?” is always “It depends.” The bottom line is that there are no clear-cut guidelines for choosing colors for your brand. How to make practical decisions about color in your marketing and branding The key is to look for practical ways to make decisions about color. So the idea that colors such as yellow or purple are able to evoke some sort of hyper-specific emotion is about as accurate as your standard palm reading.Ĭonsider the inaccuracy of making broad statements such as “green means calm.” The context is absent: Sometimes green is used to brand environmental issues, like Seventh Generation, but other times it’s meant to brand financial spaces, such as Mint.Īnd while brown may be useful for a rugged appeal - see how it’s used by Saddleback Leather - when positioned in another context, brown can be used to create a warm, inviting feeling (Thanksgiving) or to stir your appetite (every chocolate commercial you’ve ever seen).īut there’s still plenty to learn and consider if we humbly accept that concrete answers aren't a guarantee. Research shows that personal preferences, experiences, upbringings, cultural differences, and context muddy the effect that individual colors have on us. There have been myriad attempts to classify how people react to different individual colors:īut the truth is that color is too dependent on personal experiences to be universally translated to specific feelings. The problem with the psychology of color in marketing and branding Consider this: In a study titled “ Impact of color on marketing,” researchers found that up to 90% of snap judgments made about products can be based on color alone.

It’s an important field of study to consider when creating marketing assets, building a new business, or rebranding an existing one. In marketing and branding, color psychology is focused on how colors impact consumers’ impressions of a brand and whether or not they persuade consumers to consider specific brands or make a purchase.

But why is such a potentially colorful conversation so unwaveringly shallow? What is color psychology?Ĭolor psychology is the study of how colors affect perceptions and behaviors. These surface-level discussions leave us unequipped to make smart decisions about how to use the color spectrum to convey the right message with our marketing and branding.

Color emotion guide wheel