‘How To Choose The Right Colour For Your Brand’ – D’Souza’s Latest Article

Read Sean D’Souza’s latest ‘PsychoTactics’ article titled “How To Choose The Right Colour For Your Brand”.

D’Souza’s ‘Psychotactics’ article is reprinted here.

How To Choose The Right Colour For Your Brand

Here’s a simple exercise. Go to the mall. Pick up a box of Pringle’s potato chips for me, will ya?

But when you get back to your home, you find something strange. The pack doesn’t say Pringle’s. It says Jingles. And someone has misspelled the word ‘chips’ and spelt it as ‘chops’. So instead of Pringle’s Potato Chips, you’ve got Jingle’s Potato Chops.

So how did you end up with this strange brand?

You chose colour as a recognition pattern

When you walked down the aisle over-filled with potato chips (yes, I know, I avoid that aisle too), you ended up picking what looked like Pringles. And today, it just happened to be Jingles Potato chops. But you know what happened, right? You trusted the colour of the product, because it was located in the right aisle.

And you trusted the shape

Because Pringle’s is so unique in its shape and packaging, you didn’t even look twice. In effect, Pringle’s has taken over a very strong position in your brain. They own the colour ‘red’ and the ‘shape of the container.’ Of course, today we’re talking about colour, so let’s stick to colour, shall we?

So how does colour affect your brand?

Surely you don’t sell chips. Yes, you don’t, but you can still use colour to create a factor of branding. Colour literally gives you a message. In most Western countries and across Asia too, colour has a common language. But there are exceptions. And you have to understand local cultures, especially if you plan to launch a brand in a local culture. Here are the most common expressions of colour:

– Red: urgency, passion, heat, love, blood, excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed, danger

– Yellow: warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness, cowardice, brightness

– Blue: truth, dignity, power, coolness, melancholy, heaviness, trust, reliability, belonging, coolness

– Orange: playfulness, warmth, vibrant

– Green: nature, health, cheerfulness, environment, money, vegetation, nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance

– Purple: wealth, royalty, sophistication, intelligence, royal, spirituality, dignity

– Pink: soft, sweet, nurture, security

– Black: sophistication, elegant, seductive, mystery, death, rebellion, strength, evil

– White: purity, cleanliness, lightness, emptiness, pure, virginal, clean, youthful, mild

– Gold: prestige, expensive

– Silver: prestige, cold, scientific

Look at colour all around you:

– What colour is the Warehouse?

– What colour is New Zealand?

– What colour is Santa?

– What colour is Fedex?

– What colour is Foodtown?

– What colour is Harley Davidson?

– What colour are the All Blacks? (ok that was a trick question!)

So what’s the learning?

Some important points:

1) Don’t get hung up on the overall brand colour: There’s a difference between the brand and the sub-brand. So 3M is a bright red colour, but Post-It is all about Yellow. You can indeed, have brands and sub-brands, as long as you give them different names and a different identity.

2) Different names? Yes different names. Each of the products have a whole new identity. Notice how publishing companies work? A publishing house may print a men’s magazine, a health magazine, a women’s magazine, and dozens of other publications. But each product has its own identity. And name. If you plan to extend your brands, make sure they have their own identity and name.

3) And just remember, there are no hard and fast rules. Purple is the colour of death in Brazil, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t launch your product in purple, or that there are no products in purple in Brazil. That’s a whole lot of nonsense. All you need to do is be vigilant of the connotations, and then decide if it works for your product/service or not.

4) Once you’ve chosen a colour, roll it out and keep it rolled out., The more your customers see your colour (or combination of colours) the more likely they’re going to remember you and your brand. You don’t have to be a big player in the market. Even with a small budget, and a powerful colour strategy, you can stand out and be different.

5) Remember that customers (that’s you, me and everyone else) make a lot of choices simply by using colour. That’s why we know that Martians are green. And Pringle’s is red.

But read the packaging too, will ya? Just so we don’t end up with Jingle’s! 🙂
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*IMNewswatch would like to thank Sean D’Souza and Psychotactics for granting permission to reprint this latest article.