Table of Contents

• What is color psychology?
• How Does Colour Psychology Affect Marketing?
• How to boost your marketing by utilizing colour psychology?

1. Learn the fundamentals of colour psychology
2. Start with emotion first
3. Take inspiration from other brands
4. Continue to be consistent with your branding.
5. Create a brand color palette
6. Consider the cultural context
7. Try to include blue
8. Run color tests with your audience

• The issue with colour psychology in branding and marketing

What is color psychology?

The study of how colours influence perceptions and behaviors is known as colour psychology. Colour psychology in marketing and branding is concerned with how colours affect consumers’ perceptions of a brand and whether or not they influence consumers to think about particular brands or make purchases.

It’s a crucial area of study to take into account while developing marketing assets, starting a new company, or rebranding an existing one. Think about this – according to a study titled “Impact of colour on marketing,” researchers found that up to 90% of quick judgements about products can be made solely based on colour.

How Does Colour Psychology Affect Marketing?

Colour evokes emotion. It arouses feelings. Additionally, choosing colours for your company is not any different. Your brand may stand out from the crowd or blend in depending on the colours you use for your marketing campaigns. You may influence your audience’s perception of you and get them to see what you want them to see by cleverly using colour in your marketing campaigns. This is why knowing the psychology of colour can be so helpful for your marketing campaigns. Because it can assist you in portraying your brand as you desire.

While making the proper colour choices might improve how people see your brand, making the wrong ones can hurt your business’s reputation. For instance, if you use the incorrect colours for your text or logo, it may become harder for your audience to read and comprehend. Or you run the risk of being completely disregarded.

Marketers can use colour to affect how consumers feel and act towards a brand as well as how they comprehend any information. People can decide what is essential by using colour. And for that reason, content marketers must be aware of the significance of various colour.

How to boost your marketing by utilizing colour psychology?

Here are some tips on how to utilize colour psychology to increase the effectiveness of your marketing now that we have a better understanding of what colour psychology is and how utilizing the appropriate or wrong colours can affect your marketing.

1. Learn the fundamentals of colour psychology

Understanding the fundamentals can surely help you use colour psychology in your marketing efforts.  Every colour has a significance that can evoke a specific emotion. Here are some basic colours and the feelings they might arouse, along with examples from popular and well-known brands:

Blue Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Instills trust, loyalty, logic, serenity, security, and tranquility.
• Negative Emotions: Can convey coldness, emotionless-ness, unappetizing, and unfriendliness.

Blue has a calming effect on the mind and is commonly used in interior design and Feng Shui. It provides a sense of security and dependability, making it suitable for brands dealing with personal and sensitive information like American Express and LinkedIn.

Red Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Evokes power, passion, excitement, energy, and fearlessness.
• Negative Emotions: Can trigger aggression, hostility, anger, danger, and pain.

Red creates a sense of urgency and is associated with movement, such as heart rate and blood pressure. It stimulates appetites, making it a popular choice for fast-food brands like McDonald’s, In-N-Out Burger, and KFC.

Purple Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Suggests wealth, mysticism, imagination, wisdom, sophistication, as well as spirituality.
• Negative Emotions: May also convey aggression, hostility, anger, danger, and pain.

Purple is often used by royalty and luxury brands to establish prestige. It’s linked to excess and decadence, making it suitable for logos and advertisements of confectionery brands like Cadbury and Milka.

Orange Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Radiates friendliness, cheerfulness, confidence, vitality, courage, warmth, innovation, as well as energy.
• Negative Emotions: Can be associated with frustration, ignorance, and immaturity.

Orange generates a feeling of warmth and coziness and is used by sports teams like the Miami Dolphins to convey motivation and energy. It’s strongly linked to fun and entertainment-based television channels like Nickelodeon and TNT.

Magenta (Pink) Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Represents passion, innovation, creativity, as well as quirkiness.
• Negative Emotions: Can be seen as impulsive, extravagant, rebellious, or saucy.

Magenta is widely used to depict femininity and youth and is associated with hope and comfort. Brands like Barbie, Cosmopolitan magazine, and Victoria’s Secret commonly use magenta, and awareness-raising foundations like Susan G. Komen for breast cancer research use it.

Brown Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Conveys strength, reliability, security, safety, as well as sophistication.
• Negative Emotions: May evoke feelings of loneliness and sadness.

Brown is seen as earthy and natural as well as is often used in food packaging to indicate organic, natural, or eco-friendly products. It has an association with reliability, dependability, and nurturing qualities, making it suitable for brands like UPS, Hershey’s, and J.P. Morgan Chase.

Yellow Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Radiates warmth, optimism, happiness, creativity, as well as intellect.
• Negative Emotions: Can trigger fear, caution, anxiety, frustration, cowardice, and irrationality.

Yellow represents youthfulness and works well with contrasting colors like red. Brands like Nikon, DHL, and BIC use yellow in their logos.

Green Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Evokes hope, health, nature, growth, prosperity, balance, as well as harmony.
• Negative Emotions: Can lead to boredom, envy, possessiveness, or materialism.

Green symbolizes life and the natural world, often associated with wealth and power. Commonly used by health brands and environmentally focused companies like Whole Foods, John Deere, and Animal Planet.

White Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Represents innocence, purity, cleanliness, as well as simplicity.
• Negative Emotions: Can convey emptiness, plainness, caution, distance, or coldness.

White signifies contemporariness and simplicity and brands like Zara, Apple, Tesla, and Sony use it.

Black Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Suggests power, security, elegance, authority, substance, as well as sophistication.
• Negative Emotions: May evoke coldness, heaviness, mourning, oppression, or depression.

Black is a powerful and contrasting color used for sleek and upscale products. Brands like The New York Times, Nike, Nespresso, and L’Oréal use black to convey authority, strength, and luxury.

Gold Color Psychology:

• Positive Emotions: Implies success, wisdom, compassion, charisma, as well as optimism.
• Negative Emotions: Can have association with self-centeredness and demanding traits.

Gold has an association with wealth in many cultures worldwide and has a link with royalty and religion. High-end companies like Rolex, Versace, and Porsche incorporate gold into their logos and products.

2. Start with emotion first

Starting with the emotion you want your audience to feel is essential whether choosing a colour scheme for new advertisements or revising your brand’s existing colours. Should they react in fear? Curiosity? Confidence? Be careful to pick the appropriate colour after you are aware of the intended result.

3. Take inspiration from other brands

The best way to get better at using the psychology of color is to pay attention to ads, websites, and branding and how the colors make you feel.

4. Continue to be consistent with your branding.

In a study on logo recognition conducted by the SEO company Reboot, 78% of participants were able to identify the logo’s main colour whereas only 43% could recollect the company’s name. Make sure the colour is consistent and present everywhere if your target market associates your brand with a specific colour. Because of this, maintaining colour harmony with your branding is crucial, and the most successful brands understand this.

5. Create a brand color palette

Creating a brand color palette involves defining your brand’s identity, selecting a primary color, choosing complementary secondary colors, considering color psychology, creating variations of these colors, testing them in different materials, and documenting the chosen color codes. This process ensures a consistent yet versatile approach to branding, striking a balance between standing out and avoiding a spammy look.

6. Consider the cultural context

Not everyone perceives colour the same way. In reality, according to MIT researchers, the words we have and use to describe colour differ depending on the language. Some communities have three color categories, while others have up to 12—a significant range in categories, before even getting into individual colors. It follows that not everyone shares the same perceptions of colour. Because of this, it’s critical to consider cultural context while developing your branding and marketing.

7. Try to include blue

Don’t worry if you’ve reached this point and think it’s overwhelming and impossible to keep track of cultural context, adhere to a colour scheme, and rely on the fundamentals of colour psychology. It will take some time and practice to get knowledgeable about colour psychology fundamentals and include it into your marketing workflow.

But in the meantime, here’s a quick rule of thumb: Add some blue when in doubt. People across the globe like and use Blue. That could be one of the explanations for why the logos of some of the most popular firms in the world feature the colour blue. Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, American Express, IBM, etc. – it goes on and on. Therefore, blue is a good choice if you’re seeking for a shortcut or a sure thing.

8. Run color tests with your audience

This may seem to contradict everything we’ve said thus far. However, in practice, it’s not always possible to anticipate how your audience will react to a certain colour, let alone specific shades, tones, or tints in your colour scheme. A/B testing can be useful in this situation. See which colour your audience likes by experimenting with two backgrounds for your website’s buttons or advertisements. Then use that information. That’s surely the best way to leverage color psychology to improve your marketing. Test—and keep testing.

The issue with colour psychology in branding and marketing

There have been several attempts to describe how different colours make people feel, but the reality is that colour is too reliant on individual experiences to be generally associated with any one set of emotions. According to research, environment, cultural variations, personal preferences, experiences, upbringings, as well as circumstances can all affect how certain colours affect us. Therefore, the assumption that hues like yellow or purple may elicit a single, very specific feeling is about as accurate as a traditional palm reading.

Think about how inaccurate it is to say something like, “Green means calm.” The context is missing: Green can be useful to promote environmental causes, as with Seventh Generation, or financial sectors, as with Mint. And while Saddleback Leather uses brown to generate a tough appeal, brown can also be useful to evoke warm, welcoming feelings (think Thanksgiving) or pique your appetite (think of all the chocolate advertisements you’ve ever seen). But if we sincerely accept that definitive answers aren’t certain, there is still much to discover and take into account. The idea is to consider pragmatic approaches to choose colours.

In conclusion, color psychology plays a vital role in marketing and branding, offering a powerful means to evoke emotions, convey messages, and influence consumer behavior. While it’s important to recognize that individual and cultural factors can impact color perceptions, a thoughtful understanding and application of color psychology principles can enhance the effectiveness of marketing efforts and help brands create lasting connections with their audiences.