Color Theory and Branding

The implications of color’s effect on people’s emotions are far reaching, and understanding your customers’ connections to certain colors could increase the effectiveness of your company’s branding methods.

According to research complied by web design and marketing company WebPageFX, people make a subconscious judgment about a product in less than 90 seconds of viewing, and a majority of these people base that assessment on color alone. In fact, almost 85% of consumers cite color as the primary reason they buy a particular product, and 80% of people believe color increases brand recognition.

With that stated, the truth of the matter is that color is too dependent on personal experiences to be universally translated to specific feelings. We should understand the basics of color and the meaning it carries while being aware that the psychological impact of color is not universally consistent.

Why are we learning the meaning of color? Certain colors DO broadly align with specific traits (e.g., brown with ruggedness, purple with sophistication, and red with excitement). But nearly every academic study on colors and branding will tell you that it's far more important for your brand's colors to support the personality you want to portray instead of trying to align with stereotypical color associations.

Consider the inaccuracy of making broad statements such as "green means calm." The context is missing; sometimes green is used to brand environmental issues such as Timberland's G.R.E.E.N standard, but other times it's meant to brand financial spaces such as Mint.com.

And while brown may be useful for a rugged appeal (think 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).

Bottom line: I can't offer you an easy, clear-cut set of guidelines for choosing your brand's colors, but I can assure you that the context you're working within is an absolutely essential consideration.

It's the feeling, mood, and image that your brand creates that play a role in persuasion. Be sure to recognize that colors only come into play when they can be used to match a brand's desired personality (i.e., the use of white to communicate Apple's love of clean, simple design).

Without this context, choosing one color over another doesn't make much sense, and there is very little evidence to support that 'orange' will universally make people purchase a product more often than 'silver'.

Debunking the "best" color for conversion rates on websites has recently been a very popular topic. They make some excellent points, because it is definitely true that there is no single best color for conversions.

The psychological principle known as the Isolation Effect states that an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" is more likely to be remembered. Research clearly shows that participants are able to recognize and recall an item far better (be it text or an image) when it blatantly sticks out from its surroundings.

Consider, for instance, this often-cited example of a boost in conversions due to a change in button color:

The button change to red boosted conversions by 21 percent, but that doesn't mean that red holds some sort of magic power to get people to take action.

We find additional evidence of the isolation effect in a myriad of multivariate tests, including this one conducted by Paras Chopra and published in Smashing magazine. Chopra was testing to see how he could get more downloads for his PDFProducer program, and included the following variations in his test:

Can you guess which combination performed the best? (Hint: remember, contrast is important.)

Here were the results:

As you can see, example #10 outperformed the others by a large margin. It's probably not a coincidence that it creates the most contrast out of all of the examples. You'll notice that the PDFProducer text is small and light gray in color, but the action text ("Download for Free") is large and red, creating the contrast needed for high conversions.

While this is but one study of many, the isolation effect should be kept in mind when testing color palettes to create contrast in your web design and guide people to important action areas.

With all that stated, color matters a lot. In and of itself, color does not matter as much as we would like. However, picking the right color palette for a brand is essential to reinforcing the brands identity.

The most notable points in these images is the supremacy of blue across both genders (it was the favorite color for both groups) and the disparity between groups on purple. Women list purple as a top-tier color, but no men list purple as a favorite color. (Perhaps this is why we have no purple power tools, a product largely associated with men?)

For quality information on choosing the right color palette, go to http://coschedule.com/blog/color-psychology.

Sources

• http://www.fastcompany.com/3028378/leadership-now/what-your-logos-color-says-about-your-company-infographic
• https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233843