Colour Psychology in Branding
What you need to know to help brand your business.
Colour psychology is used a lot within brand and marketing and as I’m at the exploration stage of Brand Geenie’s aesthetics, now feels like the right time to get geeked up on the topic.
So let’s go back to the beginning…
The History of Colour Psychology
Sir Isaac Newton discovered the colour spectrum during the late seventeenth century and looked into how each colour is defined by a different wavelength of light. Newton then went on to develop The Newton Disc, or as you and I might know it, the Colour Wheel.
*Cool sciency side note: It’s also known in the world of Physics as the Disappearing Colour Disc (that’s a mouthful) because when it spins at speed (another mouthful), the colours appear as white. White light consists of seven colours (the Colour Wheel) and the human eye isn’t able to differentiate between them when they’re moved at a high speed.
Fast forward to the early twentieth century, and Carl Jung spent time studying the effects of colour on the human mind. He eventually developed a form of colour therapy that allowed his patients to communicate and express themselves using colours and images. Science and psychology aside, if you think about it, we use colour to express ourselves ALL THE TIME from the clothes that we wear to the way we design our homes. So off the bat, it’s pretty easy to suggest that colour choice is incredibly subjective.
How is Color Psychology is used in Marketing and Advertising?
Color psychology has been considered carefully and used in marketing and advertising for years to create a point of difference. Here are the top three areas it can really make a change:
Brand Identity: Carefully chosen colour palettes can complement and communicate a brand personality. The perfect colour scheme is essential for expressing the right perspective to the right clientele.
Targeting: Businesses can sharpen their marketing efforts toward certain demographics by conducting tests, gathering data and making specific colour choices according to the colour preferences of that target audience. These studies can be large scale and costly but as a smaller business or freelancer you can use your social media following, friends and family and even your current client base to gain other perspectives.
Conversion: Conversion rates measure the percentage of customers who finish a task set by you. For example, filling out a form to subscribe to a newsletter or clicking a button to ‘book now’. Changing the colour of your call to action or buttons has been proven to increase your conversion rates. As you can see below, The Isolation Effect is used in both colour and design to influence your decision making:
Differentiating your Brand: The Isolation Effect
Consider the psychological principle known as The Isolation Effect. In other words, an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” is far more likely to be remembered. A good example of this would be if I asked you to name the feature colour used in Tarantino’s Sin City movies? Whilst this is a more extreme example of The Isolation Effect, due to the film's monochromatic styling, you can see how a vivid isolated item is more easily recalled.
A study from 2006, involving MRI scanning shows that our brains respond better to immediately recognisable brands, which makes your colour choice and style an important consideration when creating your brand identity.
“A new study gauging the brain's response to product branding has found that strong brands elicit strong activity in our brains. "Brain branding" is a novel, interdisciplinary approach to improve the understanding of how the mind perceives and processes brands. Using modern imaging methods, researchers are now able to go beyond marketing surveys and gather information on how the brain responds to a particular brand at the most basic level.”
Christine Born, M.D., radiologist at University Hospital, Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.
How do people respond to colour in branding?
Our moods and feelings are constantly changing and it’s believed that colours play an important role in forming attitudes. When it comes to picking colours, research has found that considering consumer reaction to the appropriateness of your colour choice is more important than the colour itself.
Making data driven decisions is paramount in any form of marketing so whilst YOU will know your brand and it’s personality better than anyone else, it’s always a good idea to collate feedback from other people to gain an objective perspective and make sure you’re communicating your vision clearly.
Decision making and perceptions of brand colours
There's a snappy 90 second window where people will make up their minds during the initial interaction with people or products.
Up to 90% of snap judgments made about your brand can be based on colour alone.
Joe Hallock’s work on Colour Assignment highlights clear preferences in specific colours across gender.
When it comes to shades, tints, and hues women prefer softer colours and men generally prefer bold colours.
Men were more likely to select shades of colours as their favourites (colours with black added).
Women are more receptive to tints of colours (colours with white added).
Brands that sell products of different colours that use creative names are preferred over the original colour title. Think Farrow and Ball’s Cabbage White, Teresa’s Green or Mole’s Breath.
Three things to remember when looking into colour psychology:
Colour psychology is largely impacted by personal preference.
Different colours have different meanings, connotations, and psychological effects that vary across different cultures.
Colour is too dependent on personal experiences to be universally translated to specific feelings.
The response to my IG stories about negative perceptions of colour was SO interesting. It became very clear, very quickly that there was no one size fits all when it came to the interpretation of colours and branding.
For example;
“Green and Blue always say ‘healthcare’ to me”
Which prompted this response:
“I disagree and raise you a polo mint - or is this green and blue separately? In which case, I immediately think of Whatsapp, Starbucks or Twitter and Facebook”
Different people. Different connotations. Which brings me very nicely onto recognition and recall.
Colour palettes:
Think of this as your branding wardrobe. You open the wardrobe doors and there’s a combination of the perfect colours that match your style and personality that can be applied to any item of clothing.
There are studies on colour combinations, one measuring aesthetic response and the other looking at audience preferences found that while a large majority of consumers prefer colour patterns with similar hues they also favourite palette with highly contrasting accent colour. (Remember the impact of The Isolation Effect).
This means it could be worth creating a visual structure consisting of base colours and contrasting them with a memorable accent colour.
Points to take away:
Just because a topic is peppered with plenty of maybes doesn’t mean we should stop thinking critically about it.
There is SO much research available and challenging perceived notions to ask questions and dig around for other perspectives is key to making the right decision.
While certain colors do broadly align with specific traits (e.g. pink with playfulness), nearly every academic study on colors and branding will tell you that it’s far more important for colours to support the personality you want to portray instead of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and focusing on stereotypical colour assumptions.
It’s about PERCEPTION rather than a fixed response because colour preference is subjective so…
Think critically
Gather data
Stand out
Be authentic
Sources:
https://ui-patterns.com/patterns/isolation-effect
https://www.helpscout.com/blog/psychology-of-color/
https://londonimageinstitute.com/how-to-empower-yourself-with-color-psychology/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061128083022.htm
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1421391?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-459X.2011.00360.x