The Science of Color

As you are creating your logo, brand standards, website, or next printed materials, remember:  COLOR HAS MEANING.  

Please do not choose your organization's color palette based on your favorite color.  The human brain reacts to colors in different ways.  Savvy marketers have taken that data and used it to their clients' advantage in logos, promotional materials, and in-store.

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Dashburst shares that 84.7% of buyers claim color is the primary draw card.  Here is a list of basic colors and how Americans perceive the color:

• Blue - Promotes stability, security, and reliability.  Increases productivity.  Decreases appetite.
• Green - Creates a feeling of relaxation, health, and harmony.  Increases decisiveness.
• Red - Associated with urgency and stimulation.  Can encourage appetite.
• Yellow - Invokes energy, optimism, and enthusiasm.  Can encourage urgency.
• Black - Suggests authority, power, and strength.
• White - Associated with purity and cleanliness.

The following chart was posted in Entrepreneur with a credit to The Logo Company.  It gives a wonderful summary of color and brands:

One more thing to share about colors and marketing:  Colors can have cultural nuances.  If your brand crosses cultural borders, make sure you check your colors across all of them.  

For example:  USP created a wonderful brand with just the color brown.  It works successfully in the U.S. and most countries, except:

• When introducing UPS into Germany, the UPS brown uniforms were too reminiscent of Hitler's "brown shirts" for some people.  UPS changed the German UPS uniforms to green.
• In Spain, hearses are brown.  Since the European UPS trucks are smaller and looked a bit like a Spanish hearse, USP repainted all of its Spain-based delivery trucks to a different color.

Trust the research, and your trusted marketing partner, when choosing the RIGHT color palette for your organization.