What the colours of your brand say about your business

Your brand’s colour can have a vital role in your business’s first impression on your target audience. As we all know, colours convey certain feelings and emotions. Your business, with the help of the psychology of colours, can convey trust and strike an air of familiarity among people. That’s exactly why famous brands in the world have a strong brand story, because of their colour choice. Even though sometimes they don’t associate text with their logo, the colour is perfectly sending the message they need.

All this is due to the precise colours chosen to represent your brand strategy. It is crucial that you integrate your branding colours into your website, landing page, logo, and social media accounts to send the right message to your target audience. Colour consistency will help you establish stronger brand awareness in the marketplace and gives you the power to be recognised as a strong and trustworthy business.

How do famous brands use colours?

Blue seems to be the dominant colour choice with all the top 100 famous brands. Almost 33% of the top 100 brands used it as their primary colour. Red comes next with 29% of the brands, then black or shades of black makeup 28% of the brands and finally yellow or gold is in the 4th place with 13%.

What’s fascinating is that 95% of the top 100 companies used just one or two colours when designing their brand. This is easily understandable because using fewer colours in branding helps maintain consistency and keep it simple yet appealing. An interesting point was that only 41% of the top 100 brands used text with their brand and logo. This fact may prove that you don’t really need to associate text with your logo to be recognised.

How do people react to brand colours?

Every clour has its own characteristics and evokes certain feelings in people. We can categorise colours into two groups; warm and cool. Warm colours provoke energy, while cool colours tend to promote calmness and security. How do each shade of these colours affect us, and what feelings will they elicit when we associate them with our brand? Every brand needs to understand the psychology of colours in order to send the right message and evoke the required emotions.

Red

Read is a very powerful colour. It is probably the only colour that can be used negatively and positively. It evokes all kinds of strong feelings, such as love, passion, rage, power, courage, and danger. Red is full of life, and looking at it will always leave you with warmth and excitement.

Brands: Coca-Cola, YouTube, CNN, NETFLIX

Purple

Purple is widely considered a royalty colour. It’s always associated with power, wealth, and extravagance. That’s why we see it being used with many high-end products. It also evokes feelings like wisdom, ambition, and imagination. Purple is a mysterious colour, and it is always a brilliant idea to let it present mysterious and spiritual elements. It’ll definitely sparkle your brand with magical stuff.

Brands: Yahoo, Syfy, FedEx

Blue

Blue is the most popular colour among brands, and that’s not a coincidence. What do we feel when we look at the blue sky? Peace, right? Blue is always associated with calmness and ease of mind. It also makes people trust your brand. That’s precisely why so many companies use it in their brand. Other emotions that blue and brig up in people are sincerity, calmness and inspiration.

Brands: Visa, hp, Facebook

Green

The type of feelings that are always associated with the colour green are always considered positive and lively. Emotions like serenity, safety, generosity, health, prestige, and prosperity are the dominant characteristics of this colour. So, if you are a brand that promotes these kinds of feelings, then it’s best to polish your brand with green to evoke the correct feelings when people interact with your business.

Brands: Spotify, Starbucks, Land Rover.

Yellow

if you want your brand to send a message of positivity then you should go with yellow. With its different shades, it represents the different colours of the sun which will bring hope and increase optimism. Another very useful advantage of this colour is that it stands out among other colours and that will make your brand looks more prominent.

Other emotions that go tow to tow with yellow are motivation, happiness, creativity, and warmth to name a few. It is best to spray this colour all over your brands and logo if you want to catch some eyes that are looking for those specific emotions we mentioned above.

Brands: CAT, Chevrolet, Snapchat, Subway,  

Orange

Since this colour is a blend of yellow and red it harbours both of their characteristics. You will evoke optimism alongside warmth and passion. It will make people feel more energised and it will ignite the kind of spirit that loves to explore and go on adventures.

Brands: Hermes, Fanta, Miranda, Soundcloud

Brown

if you want to strike the kind of emotions that promote simplicity, brown is your go-to colour. Also considered the colour of nature, brown can reflect trust without being too forward. You can be classy and trustworthy all at the same time without sounding too bold. If your business is related to these kinds of feelings, this colour can aid you a lot. Just be careful not to overuse it since it can remind people of the earth and dirt.

Brands: m&m’s, Ups, Louis Vuitton,  

Black

One of the most popular brands’ colours is black and that’s no surprise. If you want to aim for class and look as sophisticated as possible then you can’t go wrong with choosing black. With black, your brand identity and its recognition will be noticed a lot faster because it’s a kind of colour that is hard to miss. This colour is one of few colours that can go perfectly with other colours to evoke required emotions without sacrificing its characteristics (prestige, power, value).

Brand: Apple, Sony, Adidas, Nike

White

In the healthcare sector, the predominant colour is white. The three main reasons for that are its simplicity, purity and cleanliness. But it can be used with other brands as well. For example, any businesses that are related to children can effectively utilise white in their brand identity to evoke those emotions. Other feelings that are associated with white can be pureness, nobility, and softness of the colour.

Brands: Tesla, Mini, Chanel

Final words

The world of colours is pretty huge and understanding the psychology behind each colour is a necessity for every brand. Choosing the suitable colour for your brand is not just a mundane task, but a very much important aspect of your identity and your business story.

With the right colours, you can provoke the kind of feeling you want in your target audience and compel them to follow you or require your services. So the next time you want to choose a colour for your logo or brand, think twice before deciding on a colour.