How to Choose the Right Color For Your Brand

Understanding the proper use of color is essential to creating a positive small business branding image. Color can send a positive or negative message, increase sales, excite an audience, or make an athlete perform better.

At a very young age we begin to learn the meaning of color from our social, cultural and environmental surroundings. We learn about the meaning of color from our parents, teachers, friends and even advertisements that we see in stores and product packaging. As we learn about the meaning of color we begin to associate emotional reactions and expectations to specific colors. As adults, many of our psychological reactions to color are universal.

In 2001 Marcel Zentner of the University of Geneva conducted a study to explore the relationship between color and emotion (“Preferences for Colours and Colour-Emotion Combinations in Early Childhood,” Developmental Science, 2001). http://www.affective-sciences.org/node/659

The study concluded that young children associate color with emotion, but they do it differently from adults. Zentner found that children associated bright colors with Happy and dark colors with Sad. Adults color choices were specific and consistent.

“People will actually gamble more and make riskier bets when seated under a red light as opposed to a blue light. That’s why Las Vegas is the city of red neon.” Pantone http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/Pantone.aspx?pg=19382&ca=29

The one most important ingredient in knowing how to select color is having knowledge about your target audience.

Understanding the social, cultural and economic backgrounds of your target audience will give you insight into selecting color that communicates clearly to your audience. Learn about your audience by getting involved in similar daily activities. Read the same magazines and books, eat the same food, and study their culture. Keep notes of what colors are being used to represent what types of products and services, and how they elicit specific emotions.

An excellent activity to learn about color preferences of your target audience is to scrapbook images of products that they use. Examine the images for their color groups and try to conclude the most used colors. Most likely a pattern of colors will be apparent.

Once you understand what colors affect your target audience and how they react to specific colors psychologically, it is much easier to select colors for your small business brand that communicates a clear concise message.

If you do your research and understand your audience’s color preferences you will be able to grab their attention by combining colors that are both appealing as well as adding an element of surprise. The final color combination will be distinct, separating you from your competitors while imprinting a positive perception in your targeted clients mind.

– Christine