What You Need To Know When Choosing Your Brand Colors

One of the first things people notice about your brand is your color scheme. 

People buy with their eyes, then their emotions, then they consider price. 

We have all had that moment where something shimmery caught our eye  – same concept with your color scheme for your brand. 

Pablo Picasso said,

“Colors like features follow the change of emotions”.

Well, what exactly does that mean?

When I say the word love what emotion do you think of? Most people think of red – or occassionally pink. 

Even the difference between red and pink can usually be tied to an emotion… If I think about the love I have for my husband, that’s a romantic feeling and usually connected to the color red. 

If I think about the love I have for my daughter, a different type of love, I would associate that more with pink.

Let’s do another example, still using the color red, don’t you usually associate that with danger? 

So, what emotions do you want to evoke in your audience? 

Do you want them to see you as someone that is Affordable? 

Regal? Playful, cheerful, optimistic?
Or do you want them to see you as someone that is bold, serious, and edgy?

You have to think about the personality of your brand. So where do you use these colors? 

Your colors will cover everything… Your logo, your website, your social media, down to the clothes you wear and the colors you paint your walls. 

Think about the history of branding… So branding started back with cattle.

Farmers branded their cows so that if they wandered onto someone else’s property they knew where to return the cow.

The same concept applies, in a less painful way, to your content. 

We are branding it to become recognizable and attract your ideal client by evoking emotions.

So, that’s what you need to do, you need to sell it with your eyes first. 

You want your audience to be able to recognize your content without even having to read the words you want to evoke that emotion immediately. 

Let me give you a couple of examples here… I think about fast food restaurants, McDonald’s, Sonic, Wendy’s, In and Out Burger, they all used very infamous colors in the fast-food industry, red and yellow.

Red signifies passion very often, yellow signifies action! It can also signify optimism and cheerfulness. 

Yes – we are getting deep here, but there is a whole psychology behind the color wheel!

So, if I put red and yellow together I’m passionately taking action, meaning as I’m driving by, I see a McDonald’s…I’m going to swing in quickly and get a McDouble in a split decision whether I’m hungry or not. I know it’s going to make me cheerful. Crazy right? 

You need to do some discovery on what personality you want your brand to signify. 

So how do you determine what your brand identity should be? Well, choosing your brand colors can be easy if you know what you’re trying to communicate. 

So the formula is typically: 

• what are you trying to communicate to your audience
• who are you communicating it to
• then you’ll discover your colors from there.

I’ll give you a few more examples here… We already talked a lot about red and yellow, but take a color like blue. Blue is often associated with health and wellness, because it’s relaxing. It looks calmness, loyalty, trustworthiness, and all of these things because it reminds people of water.

Blue is also very commonly associated with the tech world and it depends upon the complementary colors which will evoke what people signify with it. 

So a tech company would probably match blue and black. Black is bold and builds that loyalty and trust that you want with your technology. I

Whereas, a health and wellness company usually would compliment it with something like light green, gray, light pale pink. 

ALLL of these have exceptions of course, but these are industry standards. I’m a rule breaker so I’m all for pushing back! 

So one of the early steps in building a brand is determining your personality, determining who your avatar is, put those two things together and build your brand colors. 

So, tell me, did you know there was so much psychology behind brand colors? DM Me and let me know.