Color Psychology: How Do You Choose The Right Color for Your rand?

Color psychology is one of the most interesting aspects of marketing. Colors play an important role in influencing the audience's feelings and their decisions toward the product or brand, whatever its commercial activity and the target audience. If you like certain colors, and your use of them appears frequently in your personal tools, such as a wallet or phone case. Can you choose one of these colors as your brand color? Well, this is where color psychology comes in to tell you if it is appropriate to use it or not.

What is color psychology?

Color psychology is the study of how colors affect consumers' impressions of a brand, their interactions with products, and their purchasing decisions. Colors greatly influence human emotions, and this is reflected in how consumers behave. Every color you encounter gives you a different emotional experience. Green and blue evoke calm and tranquility, while red makes you feel love and passion, and orange opens up your appetite for food. Because every rule has exceptions, the effect of colors may vary from person to person depending on factors such as gender and cultural background.

For example, the color red symbolizes good luck and prosperity in Asian societies, while in Western countries it denotes passion, love, or even danger. We also see the use of pink and its shades in promotional campaigns for products for girls and women, while hot bright colors are frequently used in children's products.

These differences must be taken into account when targeting a specific segment of the audience in marketing strategies, especially when showing the product to the public for the first time so that the product is drawn in the minds of the audience in the desired image and has the expected first impression.

Why is color psychology important in marketing your brand?

Colors help enhance the brand's identity with the audience, so marketers rely on understanding the psychology of colors when integrating colors into marketing strategies and plans to influence the public's thinking about the brand and try to direct them to interact with the product and make a purchase decision.

The use of appropriate colors in the brand logo can be a competitive advantage that enables your product to stand out among its competitors, as it evokes certain feelings in them that contribute to forming an initial impression of the product and its message just by looking at it. Employing the appropriate colors in the logo helps you to convey the brand image in the way you want to establish it in the minds of your customers.

Some statistics explain how colors affect customer interactions. Using the right colors makes your brand easier and faster to be recognized by 80%. Consumers also make quick product judgments within 90 seconds, and between 60% and 90% of those judgments are based on colors alone.

Let's take Fanta, for example. The company was established in the year 1940, and over time, the brand changed the shape of the logo and font type several times but kept the colors. Blue lettering on a cheerful orange background. Why orange? Because it gives a sense of launch and vitality.

The meanings of colors in psychology

the Red

Red is the most exciting color and stimulates emotions and feelings, as it speeds up reactions and decision-making. That is why you find commercial companies using red buttons that direct consumers to take action, such as the “Order Now” button or discount banners. You will also find that the YouTube logo is also red in color to motivate users to watch.

The red color stimulates the appetite. And you will find it difficult to find a food-related brand that does not use red in its logo. From McDonald's, KFC, Burger King, even Papa John's, and other world-famous brands, the red color accounts for a large percentage of their logos.

orange

Orange sits in the middle between red and yellow on the hue table. It is influenced by its red neighbor in evoking feelings of excitement, albeit to a lesser degree. It also makes you feel warm and enthusiastic, and you will find it widespread in the slogans of sports clubs, such as Barcelona and Rome.

In addition to the feelings of excitement, warmth, and enthusiasm, the orange color helps to increase attention and is used in traffic cones to easily attract the attention of drivers while driving. Orange also appears in children's food products because it has a positive effect on appetite.

yellow

Yellow is a slightly confusing color. It is a bright color that brings a sense of happiness and joy and stimulates attention, making it suitable for use in warning signs. But on the other hand, it raises feelings of anxiety and tension, which calls for caution when using it in the design of the brand's logo.

One of the most famous brands that clearly use the color yellow in its logo is the IKEA brand. The question here is, is there a relationship between buying furniture and happiness? People feel happy about a change for the better in their lives, and the acquisition of new furniture is a good change that calls for the use of yellow in the logo to support furniture buyers' sense of happiness.

the green

Green is closely associated with nature and money. It also carries some positive meanings such as growth, fertility, and health. You can find it in the logos of pharmacies and doctors' centers, especially beauty, slimming, and slimming centers, as well as gyms. John Deere, a company that specializes in the production of landscaping equipment and tools, uses green in its logo, as well as in the colors of the equipment. They are all green in shades, which helps attract the attention of the target audience who are nature lovers.

blue

When people hear the word “blue,” the sea or sky is often the first thing that comes to mind, and that is why the color blue has always been associated with a sense of peace and tranquillity. In the business world, blue is seen as a sign of stability and reliability.

Blue is often used by brands operating in the technology field such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Dell, Samsung, PayPal, HP, and others, to give consumers a sense of confidence in the product. On the other hand, sky blue is used in the medical and cosmetic industries to indicate cleanliness.

purple

Purple results from the combination of red and blue. Therefore, it is considered a balanced color, as it combines the excitement of red with the calmness of blue, which gives a sense of sophistication and luxury, to be called the “royal color”. As a result of this balance, purple has a fan base of both men and women, thus serving as a trump card in the marketing strategy of companies selling unisex products.

Yahoo uses purple mainly in the design of the logo, website, and application, as the color appears in many buttons and application elements. Cadbury also relies on the color purple only in its logo, as it is famous for its luxury chocolate products, which makes purple an appropriate choice.

the White

White has always been associated with meanings of purity, cleanliness, beauty, and good beginnings. You will find wedding dresses come in only one color since ancient times, which is white, although the trend has been to introduce other colors besides white in recent times. And we have a long list of international brands that use white as a background in their logo or alternate between it and black, such as the international clothing company Chanel and Nike sports company.

the black

The black color symbolizes mystery, elegance, and strength, and its strength is evident in the possibility of combining it with any other color. And this is a feature that is unique to black among the rest of the colors. Black color is commonly used in fonts and written texts, and it is considered the official color for writing, as it facilitates the reading process, as it is a neutral color that everyone agrees to use.

We find many brands using the black color in their logo in various fields, for example in the field of technology we find Apple, and in the field of sports there is Adidas, and in the field of fashion, we find Zara and others.

Brown

Brown is the color of the earth and trees, so it naturally gives a sense of comfort, safety, and nature. It is often used in the marketing of products based on raw materials from nature or organic foods and wood products. Among the most famous companies that use the color brown in their logo are the famous candy company M&M, the Nespresso company that specializes in making coffee beans, as well as the American company UPS for delivery services.

Gray

Unlike other colors, gray does not give off a certain range of emotions. Therefore, it symbolizes neutrality and balance, even if it carries some negative feelings, such as a lack of energy and depression. It is directly related to development and technology, as we see electronic and car companies using it within the colors in which their products are available.

Gray is used extensively in writing and fonts because it is easy on the eyes. And it has a profound effect on other colors when it is placed between them, as it maintains a balance between hot and cold colors through its neutral appearance.

How do you choose the right colors for your brand?

The choice of colors is an important part of the brand identity and personality that you want to show your business, which requires you to be careful and careful not to give the wrong impression to your customers. Through the following steps, we help you choose the right colors for your brand.

1. Create your brand identity

The colors of your brand's logo reflect the identity of the brand, meaning brand identity here means the personality and attributes of the brand that includes the ideas it adopts and the messages it carries to the audience. Thus, the colors that you will choose must match the identity that you want to establish in the minds of your customers.

Before deciding on brand logo colors, you will first need to build your brand personality. Ask yourself how do you want the audience to see your brand? What makes your brand stand out from the competition? Here are the attributes that make up your brand identity:

• Gender: Is your brand directed to a certain group and not the other? Or serve the purposes of both sexes? If the branding activity is cosmetics, then your brand identity will be feminine. If your business is men's clothing, your brand identity is masculine. If the products are aimed at both men and women, your brand identity is public.
• Personality: What is the overall impression you want to leave on your audience? Fun, seriousness, confidence, or elegance, for example?
• Value: Are your brand's products luxury or budget?
• Age: What age group do your brand's products suit?

Defining these traits will help you map out your brand's personality so you can decide which colors will accentuate that personality, so this step comes first.

2. Learn about the meanings of colors

From the above, you have come to understand everything that each color symbolizes, to be able to choose the appropriate colors for your brand on a correct basis and according to the brand personality. There are clear and well-established trends in color selection on an industry-by-industry basis. To help you choose the right color scheme for your business, we review common color combinations for each industry.

• Food industries: Many food companies and restaurants choose warm colors that attract attention and stimulate appetite, such as red, orange, and yellow. While healthy or organic food companies tend to use the green color of the good health provided by this type of food. Blue and pink are commonly used for desserts.
• Medical industries: Health and pharmaceutical companies rely on the use of blue. Sometimes green and orange.
• Women's industries: The fashion and cosmetics industries often use black or red and orange colors, and in many cases, they tend to use pink.
• Technology industries: Blue appears frequently in the logos of technology companies, along with orange and purple.

3. Find a source of inspiration

Research competing brands and try to understand what makes them unique and successful, and think about what you can learn from their color choices. Another great resource is online color scheme generators where you can get ideas for coordinating color combinations. Among the most famous of these tools:

• Adobe Color: It is an advanced tool that helps you get harmonious color combinations, and gives you the ability to modify and customize them for your brand.
• Khroma: Relying on algorithms and AI technology, this tool asks a series of questions about your color preferences and brand identity and uses your answer to build the right color scheme for you.
• colors: This tool allows you to upload images and extract the color scheme directly from them. It also allows you to control and change the color gradients to suit you.

4. Choose the primary color for the brand

The primary color is the color that dominates the logo design, balanced by the rest of the colors. Most brands rely on just one or two colors to avoid distracting the crowd. You have 3 primary colors to choose from red, yellow, and blue.

Think carefully about which color best embodies your business's personality among these three based on their meanings and the identity you've created for your brand. Be creative and experiment with different shades, from muted to shiny brights, or if you're stumped between two shades and don't know which one is better, try mixing them together and see if it turns out to be a better color.

Of course, at the end of each experiment, you should ask those around you about their impression and what they feel, and be sure to focus your question on who you can classify within your target audience category to get accurate answers.

5. Choose secondary colors and neutral colors

Choose between two to four colors that match the base color you've chosen. These colors will be complementary colors to the primary color that support its meaning and show it stronger and may appear alongside it or independently of it. There are several color trends that you should be aware of before choosing a set of secondary colors so that you can choose what suits you best:

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• Analogous color scheme: A group of three colors located next to each other on the color wheel such as red, orange, and red-orange. If the primary color you chose is red, you can add colors that are in the same family as the primary color, such as orange and red-orange. This scheme gives you harmonious, uniform-looking color combinations.
• Monochromatic color scheme: This scheme is called monochromatic because it is based on the gradations of only one color. If the primary color is blue, then dark blue (navy blue) and light sky blue can be secondary colors depending on this scheme.
• Complementary color scheme: Complementary or contrasting colors are colors that meet each other on the color wheel at an angle of 180 degrees. This system helps give your brand a prominent and balanced look.
• Split complementary color scheme: After selecting the opposite color as in the case of the normal complementary color scheme, we choose the two colors on the opposite side of the color as secondary colors.

For example, if your main color is yellow, then the color opposite it at an angle of 180 degrees is purple according to the color wheel. Looking at the two colors on either side of magenta, red magenta on the right and blue magenta on the left are secondary colors.

• Triadic color scheme: this is when three colors on the color wheel form an equilateral triangle. For example, if you choose green as the primary colors, orange and purple can be chosen as the secondary colors.
• Quad color scheme: Similar to the triad scheme, this scheme is based on the idea of ​​four colors forming a rectangle, while those four colors are two pairs of complementary colors.
• Monotone Achromatic: The color gradient from white to black. This scheme is usually referred to as black and white because it contains only these two colors in their shades.

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After choosing secondary colors, select neutral colors. Neutral colors are the colors that you will use in the background of your business logo and the text that will appear in the logo. White or black and gray are often used at this stage

7. Test your brand colors

After completing the process of choosing the colors for your brand logo, comes the process of testing them to ensure that they are in harmony with each other and that they make the audience see your brand the way you intended it from the beginning. To get reliable results from the testing process, there are plenty of online tools and browser plug-ins that test color compatibility together, such as the Contrast Checker and Color Contrast Analyser.

Conclusion

Finally, making the final decision about choosing your brand colors requires patience, deliberation, and adequate research before confirming your choice. The wrong choice will leave a negative first impression that may cost you a lot to fix. So take your time to learn and research the psychology of color and benefit from the expertise of famous brands.

You can also use the expertise of specialists by resorting to one of the professional logo design services on the Khamsat platform, the largest Arab marketplace for microservices. And don't forget to share with us the colors you are thinking of for your brand in the comments below, and if you have any questions or suggestions we will be happy to share them with us as well.