Colors have a great impact on our mood. For instance, when someone is depressed, they like to wear dull colors. When they are excited about a trip or some other event, they wear colorful or bright clothes.
Similarly, the colors we use in our messages or gifts to others also reveal how we feel about them. If we give someone a present and wrap it up in black and white packaging, it will appear as if we are not really excited to give the present and are probably giving it out of pressure. But if we create a multi-colored and attractive gift card for someone, they will indeed feel special as they will know that we put in extraordinary effort to prepare the gift for them.
Businesses also understand color psychology. That’s why smart businessmen and marketers use color psychology in marketing. When someone builds a brand, they should keep the color psychology chart in mind. The colors you use in your marketing material express your mood towards your target audience, impacting your marketing results.
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In this post, we are going to discuss marketing color psychology. That means we will talk about the effects of different colors on your brand’s target customers and how you can use color psychology in marketing to get the best results. In other words, take this post as a guide to color psychology in marketing.
Before anything else, let’s define what color psychology is. Then we can move on to the ways and techniques through which marketing color psychology can contribute to the success of your business.
What is Color Psychology?
Color psychology is the concept of how colors impact perceptions, mindset, and behaviors. Marketing color psychology is focused on how the colors you use in your branding affect consumers’ perceptions and impressions about your brand. Using color psychology in marketing helps you determine whether or not your visual branding elements effectively increase your sales.
The more you use color psychology in marketing, the more you will practice how it works and to what extent it impacts your audience and your sales. The colors you use in a pamphlet or brochure, for instance, might be the deal-breaker for potential customers to decide whether to purchase the product that’s being promoted or not.
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Color psychology is an essential field of study. Entrepreneurs and marketers use it to create marketing assets, build up a business, develop a website, or rebrand an existing product line. A research study found that about 90% of snap judgments about brands and products are based on the colors alone.
The Problem With Marketing Color Psychology
Marketers have made many attempts to identify how people react to different color schemes and palettes. But in reality, the way a color is perceived by anyone dramatically depends on personal experiences. These experiences are translated into feelings every time someone sees the same color. These feelings and the associated emotions are thus very unique to individuals. It is hard to generalize the way different people feel about a particular color scheme, as each one of them comes from a different set of experiences and emotions that they can associate with it. On top of that, the context of the incident, cultural differences, and upbringing styles also make a difference. Hence, all these factors need to be catered for if you want to properly use color psychology.
For example, some say that yellow or purple colors usually evoke hyper emotions in people. But determining how accurate that is would be the same as determining the accuracy of someone’s palm reading. Based on this, even broader statements such as ‘green means calm’ might be all the more inaccurate. When the context is missing, you cannot really tell what color will have what kind of an effect on someone’s feelings. This makes the study of color psychology quite complicated.
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Take the example of Saddleback Leather. The main color used by this brand is brown, and the purpose of using brown is to give a warm and inviting feeling. But in usual instances, brown is used for more of a rugged appeal. Saddleback Leather does not use brown to express ruggedness. In fact, the brand uses brown color to stir up the audience’s appetite, as it looks like the color of delicious chocolate.
Making Practical Decisions About Color Psychology in Marketing
If you want to know the right color for your brand, you need to know the following first. There are actually no hard and fast rules in color psychology. That’s why no business can follow any clear-cut guidelines when choosing the colors for their brand. The context in which the colors are being used makes a huge difference. It is about the overall feeling, image, and mood that your brand creates. But if you consider the following tips, you can use color psychology to make the right choices.
1. Choose Colors That Match Your Brand Personality
A customer’s intent to purchase is greatly influenced by the colors of the product and brand. The colors used in the packaging, marketing messages, and the product determine how the customer views the brand personality. Certain colors align with specific personality traits. That’s why try to use colors that portray the kind of brand personality that you are trying to build. If you simply use stereotypical color associations, you might end up conveying a deviated brand personality than the one you wish to develop. Use color psychology to match your brand colors with your brand personality.
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2. Choose Colors That Appeal to the Audience
Good marketers do thorough research on their customer demographics and preferences. If you know what kind of colors appeal to your audience, you can use color psychology effectively.
For instance, when it comes to shades, hues, and tints, men generally prefer bold colors while women prefer softer tones. This means if your target audience is primarily men, it will make more sense for you to use a bolder range of colors. If your target customers are primarily women, use softer and lighter colors in your marketing campaigns.
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3. Choose Colors That Differentiate Your Brand
Your color scheme should not be copied from another brand. It should be unique enough to give your business its own brand identity. Color psychology is all about showing people that you can develop your own unique and creative combination of colors to represent your brand. If your brand becomes popular, your audience will begin to associate your unique color combination with your outlets, products, and services. Thus if someone copies your color scheme, they will appear to be the pirated or second-grade version of your brand.
Imagine a new pizza place opening up and coming up with a logo with the exact same red and black shades as Pizza Hut. The brand will appear to be the lower quality, copied, and cheaper version of Pizza Hut and will not margin its sales.
4. Maintain a Consistent Color Scheme
Whatever color palette you choose, it is always best to maintain consistent color psychology across the various marketing platforms or channels that you use. For instance, if you primarily promote your products online through a brand website and social media pages, make sure you put up the exact same logo everywhere. Your web design theme colors should match the color scheme you use in the images uploaded on your social media.
Previously, it used to be challenging to get your website developer to use the exact same colors in your web design as you wish. But now, things have changed to a great extent. Now you can create your website on your own without writing any code. Various website builders are available that allow users to design and build their web pages using any colors they want.
Examples of Brands Using Color Psychology in Marketing
Some of the top brands in the world use color psychology in their branding activities, particularly in designing their brand logo. Here are some examples.
1. Coca Cola
Coca-Cola primarily uses red color in its logo and other branding visuals. Red is a bold choice for a brand. It is seldom used by companies selling apparel, and more often used in the food and drinks industry. The color psychology of the bright red color sends bold signals to the audience that they really need to consume the product it’s promoting. How many people drink Coca-Cola because the doctor has recommended it to them? Of course, nobody! They drink it because they feel the urge for it, and that’s the effect of the red color psychology.
2. Facebook
Facebook uses blue all over its color scheme. Blue is a very inoffensive color. The color psychology of blue drives feelings of safety and sophistication among the audience. That’s why it is often used by companies that want to convey security, such as those in the finance, health, tech, or insurance sector.
Facebook does an admirable job using blue in its layout, app, and logo. It conveys to its users that it is safe for them to share all their personal information on Facebook.
3. Cadbury
Purple color keeps popping here and there in the Fortune 500 companies. The purple color psychology tends to bring people out of their depressed mood and give them a feeling of joy. The purple of Cadbury chocolates has this kind of effect on the consumers.
Using Color Psychology on a Website Built on Strikingly
If you build your website on Strikingly, our editor will give you a complete color palette to choose colors for applying to your web pages. You can change your font color, background color, CTA buttons, and even your overall website theme colors.
When you are working in your Strikingly editor, click the ‘Styles’ tab on the left panel.
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Here you will see options to change the color scheme of your website.
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The purpose of building these features in the Strikingly editor is to provide you with an ocean of color options to work with on your web pages. Our templates come with ready-to-use layouts and color schemes, but you have the choice to alter them to suit your branding goals.
The best use of color psychology to boost your sales is to highlight your brand’s theme colors all across your website and maintain the same palette on all other platforms that you use to promote your business.
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