Color Your Brand

Target.

Best Buy.

McDonald’s.

Starbucks.

These companies are well-known in our society and when you read their names, you can probably picture their logo and colors in your mind.

Whether you realize it or not, color has a major influence on brand recognition. Think about it: if you picture Target, you probably see red and white; think of Best Buy and you see blue and yellow; McDonald’s, you see red and yellow; think Starbucks, you see green, brown and white. 

Every time you see those color combinations in another setting, you probably associate them with that brand. The colors these companies choose are a strategic part of their branding, and those memorable color combinations are vital to their success. 

Coloring your brand is not a science, not an art, but a theory that can prove essential to the success of your business. Choosing the right colors for your brand can be complicated, but the team at Rooted Web can help!

Color Psychology 101

Branding colors are the fastest way to shortcut your way into the hearts of your audience—and you’re going to use them a lot. From your logo to website, from advertisements to storefronts, you will use your brand colors everywhere so it’s important that you like them and they tell the right story. 

If you were wondering just how important color branding is, think about this: 60 percent of consumers make their decision about a brand based on the brand’s colors. Similarly, your brand’s colors can increase brand awareness by 80 percent. So, it’s not a question of if color branding works, but how it works. 

The best place to start understanding color branding is with the psychology behind color. Different colors have different meanings and elicit different emotions depending on your culture. Color branding can be an effective way to convey your message without words. 

In Western culture, different colors are associated with specific meanings such as:

Red: Excitement, passion, attention

Yellow: Happiness, optimism, warning

White: Innocence, purity, humility

Blue: Harmony, stability, calm

Black: Mystery, sophistication, mourning

Brown: Earthy, comfort, security

Taking these meanings into consideration is essential when choosing your branding colors will help visually convey your message to your target audience. 

How to Choose Your Scheme

Before selecting your brand colors, it’s important you establish your desired audience and brand traits. This will make it easier to discover your brand identity. Ask yourself a few questions during this process:

• What is my message? 
• Who do I want to target? 
• What is my brand’s personality?
• What services do I offer? 

Deciding your brand traits can make it easier to decide what colors you want to use. Again, there are no exact rules for branding colors, but understanding your brand identity can help you better choose colors based on the messaging you want to give. 

When it comes to selecting the colors and hues you’d like to use, plan on at least three colors to make up your scheme: a base, an accent and a neutral. Next, decide what kind of color scheme you want: monochrome, complementary, triadic or any of the other dozens of types. By choosing the style, you’ll find it easy to look at colors you like and understand how they play together to compliment your brand. 

Your company needs to use colors that best compliment the business itself. How you operate, who you target, and the message you want to share are imperative to selecting the best colors. Make sure they’re colors you like since you’ll be the one looking at them the most. Like a website, your brand should be reviewed every couple of years and potentially updated to stay on-trend and relevant to your customers. If building a creative brand on your own sounds daunting, consider investing in the Rooted Web team. We are the experts in what we do and we are dedicated to helping small businesses flourish. By providing a one-stop-shop for creative marketing and website development, we can use our knowledge and passion for what we do to help create your digital ecosystem one color at a time. 

Download a quick guide to coloring your brand here.