Picture a red can of drink; a black apple and yellow arches – instantly we match them to the brands? In each example, the brand colour enables us to instantly recognise and create an emotional connection to a brand.
Your brand strategy must consider colour to be successful. Colour is more than a simple aesthetic consideration in the kit of elements that make up brand identity and experience. Colour is the very first perception customers will have with your brand, and along with perception comes a whole heap of emotional associations.
The colour of your brand is an essential element in telling your brand story. When choosing a colour to represent your brand, you must think far beyond your personal, subjective preferences.
Selecting the appropriate colour to represent and differentiate your brand must be based on several criteria. Here are three of the most important:
The Target Audience
Who is your target audience, how old are they, what interests do they have and how do they engage with your brand? People are affected by colour in different ways and cultural trends always need to be considered. What color best anchors the meaning of your value to your audience and distinguishes your brand from the competition.
The Brand Archetype
Once you determine the ideal client for your brand you need to consider what colour best represents their interests and attributes. For example, if you brand archetype is an outdoors, hiking type of person then you might look at natural greens, browns and perhaps orange. Different industries seem to gravitate towards certain colors like the medical industry is often blues, natural therapies often purples and so on.
The Culture
Colour means different things to people in different parts of the world, in different cultures. Colour perceptions and meanings change with race, age, social class, gender and religion. The demographics and psychographics that are most dominate in the culture will be an important consideration in selecting the colour that represents your brand in markets the brand serves.
The Bottom Line
Selecting colours to represent your brand should never be made swiftly without research and careful consideration. Properly chosen colours define your brand’s value, strengthen and support your brand positioning, enable greater awareness and customer loyalty, and lifts your brand to stand out from the rest. Picking the right colour should never be underestimated.
With all our branding packages we talk to the client about their desired brand colours and reasons for their selection. But we also do research on the industry, products and audience before developing a brand colour palette that will be strong, stand out and hit the target audience.
