You may have heard this nugget of marketing wisdom before: Your brand isn’t what you say it is–at the end of the day, it’s what your audience says it is.
Very true.
But that doesn’t mean businesses can’t give their audiences a nudge in the right direction with color. Marketing teams far and wide work diligently to develop and enforce consistent, effective brand guidelines on behalf of their employers to convey a company’s unique persona and help establish immediate brand connections.
Color is a big part of a brand. It helps attract, inform, and engage an audience.
Attract
Our brains use color as a way to cut through “information overload”. Therefore, people see the color of a communication message before they see anything else about a message.
Inform
Color is crucial when it comes to branding because it stirs up certain psychological associations as one of the first impressions of a business.
Warm colors stimulate, while cool colors calm. Just in case you didn’t major in color psychology in college, here’s a good overview of the psychological associations for different colors.
Memory is also impacted by color. People are much more likely to remember a logo by the color over anything else. Let’s do some name-dropping to drive home this point quickly: McDonald’s, AT&T, Ford, UPS, Coke. What pops up in your mind first?
Engage
Ads in color do almost twice as well as their black/white counterparts and sustain a viewer’s interest longer.
Check out the below screenshot of one of our blog’s email click report. The majority of viewers clicked on the blog’s unique image as opposed to the static blog banner or even the smaller orange “read the full blog” button.
Getting Your Brand Color Right
Deciding on what colors to represent your brand with is just one step in conveying your unique persona and establishing connections.
For both print and onscreen communications, make sure you are maintaining consistency with your represented business’s brand identity guidelines and using the correct color models to represent your brand in each medium.
When it comes to printing, talk with your account representative before finalizing your files. They can help you determine if offset or digital printing is right for you. If offset printing makes the most sense for your project, you can take advantage of Pantone colors. This very specific color model system will help you achieve ultimate brand bliss.
And if you’re ever in doubt with your project’s colors, just send us your company brand guidelines. We’ll help you get it right.
