The Rad Psychology of Color and How It Affects Your Bottom Line
Color psychology is the study of how colors affect perceptions and behaviors. In marketing and branding, color psychology is focused on how colors impact consumers’ impressions of a brand and whether or not they persuade consumers to consider that particular brand or make a purchase. It’s an important aspect to consider when creating marketing assets, building a new business, or rebranding an existing one. Consider this: In a study titled “Impact of color on marketing,” researchers found that up to 90% of snap judgments made about products can be based on color alone.
Color Association
Color invokes human emotions. You don’t find the color red calming, do you? And the color blue probably doesn’t make you angry. That’s because we associate different colors with different emotions – it’s a psychological fact as evidenced through nature, and tested and confirmed by modern color usage. It’s important to build your branding through colors that represent the emotions you want to convey.
Bodacious Consistency
Brand consistency is the delivery of brand messaging in line with brand identity, values, and strategy over time. Consistency means your target audience is being exposed to core messages, visual branding, and other brand elements repeatedly, which can help to solidify brand recognition. It’s the practice of always delivering messages aligned with the core brand values in the same tone, presenting the brand logo in a similar way, and repeating the same colors throughout your visual brand elements. Over time, these elements become deep-rooted in the minds of consumers, and they’re more likely to remember your brand. If you aren't regularly building brand awareness through marketing channels that can uniquely identify your business, you are doing a disservice to your marketing spend and limiting your results.
Changing Your Brand Colors
Brands can eventually get outdated or out of touch with their audience, and with trends and styles periodically changing, it's important to stay relevant. Changing your brand’s color palette without serious strategic intent can have disastrous results. Most brands employ painstaking efforts to ensure that their organization’s color is appropriate and based on well-researched data and validation with customers. Google once tested 40 different shades of blue in its logo to see which one would perform best. Using data from interactions on their homepage and Gmail page, they landed on the blue color tone that statistically performed best — a blue that was “not too red, not too green”.
Color and Schweet Conversions
Developing a clear brand identity that generates a positive response among consumers is a sign of success, but let’s face it, you also need to generate conversions and drive sales in order to meet your goals. A study published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science suggests that the psychology of color may also be key to accomplishing this objective. The study demonstrates that consumers’ response to a brand’s identity and its use of color may also affect their affinity for a brand. This means that businesses that successfully use color psychology can influence purchasing habits and brand loyalty.
While no one color has been proven to drive sales more effectively than others, the use of color psychology does appear to impact a brand’s ability to make itself stand out. Many brands make use of the Isolation Effect, a principle that suggests that a unique color in a field of uniform hues will stand out more. Brands that apply this psychological principle to brightly colored call-to-action buttons on their monochromatic landing pages, or to bold packaging that stands out among competitors on store shelves, may have much more success in driving consumers to purchase.
But it’s a process of strategic thinking, a talented team, and a few brews to get those creative juices flowing. So partner with a branding agency that knows how to do it right, goes 88mph, and makes it better.