Brand Colors and Palettes
Defined by David Ogilvy as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes”, a brand is the customers’ perception of a product, service, or company. But this is a broad description, so in order to understand what makes a brand, it’s necessary to get a better grasp of a few key concepts. The first one is brand awareness.
An important factor in a customer's purchase decision process, brand awareness relies on a persons potential to recall and recognise a company. Multiple visual elements can help with brand recognition, more specifically logos, shapes, graphics and colors.
Time for a quiz. How many tech company brands can you recognise just by color?
Here’s a little experiment to see how effective the use of color can be. Relying on color alone let’s see how many brands can you correctly identify.
As many of you probably guessed, the first image represents the Google color palette, the next one is the iconic Facebook blue color, and the last one, maybe a little more difficult, is the bright YouTube red.
How many did you get? If you guessed all three, then “Congratulations!” to you and to the brand designers.
Color psychology or how colors make us feel
Did you ever wonder why Facebook’s main color is blue? Unfortunately, the answer is a bit less scientific than you might expect. It seems that Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, so for him, blue is the color he sees best. But just because it was a personal choice does not mean it was not right one.
According to an informal study performed by KISSmetrics, blue looks to be the color preferred by both men and women. The research shows that women like blue, purple and green…
… while men respond better to blue, green and black.
What is the most popular color
According to the diagrams above, it looks like the most popular color is blue. The second most popular one is green. Two colors that are found abundantly in nature, one representing the clear sky, the other the grass and vegetation. The least popular colors seem to be orange and brown.
So does this mean that you should only use blue or green as brand colors? Not at all. As a matter of fact, in a crowded market, choosing a nonconventional color might help a brand stand out. A good example of this is the Snapchat yellow, a playful, energetic and young color. Almost the opposite of a traditional social media company like Facebook.
Brand colors and meanings
Different colors can produce different emotions for people, but it’s not always obvious how color affects decision. Big brands have started to understand the importance of this phenomenon and they are very careful in choosing the right color schemes for the message they want send.
On the right you can view a visual representation(courtesy of the good folks at The Logo Company) of how major brands want to be seen and how they picked a color to enable certain emotions among their users and customers.
The power of colors
A strong brand can increase consumer trust and loyalty and even take them to a new level. In an interview, Bill Becker, Director, Brand Center of Excellence at John Deere mentioned that some customers went as far as to paint their house in the John Deere colors to show their loyalty to the brand.