What Color is Your Brand?
What color is your brand? Many startup businesses do not understand the significance of color choices when building their branded look. However, big business entities spend large amounts of money to find a color and logo that best represents them.
When you hear the words: What Can Brown Do for You? Big Blue, or The Golden Arches, what companies come to mind? You probably guessed it correctly…UPS, IBM, and McDonalds have all built incredible brands through their branded color choices.
How Companies Trademark Their Colors
In the early 90's, Milka, which was originally a European company, created by Suchard (now a part of Kraft Foods), applied to trademark their lilac-colored cow logo. Originally, they were denied the trademark, but during a second try, they were given their trademark, because they demonstrated how many Europeans identified their purple Montbéliard cow and the bell hanging from its neck on their logo.
Trademarks are not only about color, though. A trademark is only granted in these cases because of the contours, shapes, label, signature, sound, scent and other factors.
Although you might not be able to trademark your branded color(s), you can certainly use specific colors to brand you or your company.
What Certain Colors Mean and How They Can Impact Your Brand
Here is a listing of some general colors, and their psychological meaning to the branding of your business. What message do you want your brand to send?
Black – The color black is attributed to bad, fear, anger, grief, binding, reliability, and sexuality.
Blue – The color blue represents confidence, reliability, authority, intelligence, trust, security and wisdom
Green – Green represents optimism, rebirth, relaxation, fertility, growth, spring, environment, healing, and good luck.
Orange – Orange is associated with force, encouragement, vitality, competition, potency, energy, success and strength.
Purple – If you use purple in your brand, your customers usually relates it to wealth, dignity, competition, magic, luxury, spirituality and mysticism.
Red – The color red invokes determination, desire, energy, love, power, courage, passion and potency.
Yellow – Yellow represents creativity, caution, intellect, warmth, light, energy and joy.
Other Factors That Help in Branding Your Business
While color plays a major part in branding your business, there are some other factors that are just as important.
USP – A USP is the acronym for unique selling proposition. A USP is very heavily integrated with your brand, and it helps distinguish you from your competitors. Your company's uniqueness, brands your message to your selected market.
Heavy research – Another factor that helps in branding your business, is heavy research. Major companies spend a lot of time and money on market research. In other words, they find out through customer surveys what it is that makes them buy one product over another. It's been well documented that people mostly buy out of emotion. Through market research, it's possible for any company to discover what makes a consumer buy.
Image is everything – By sending the type of image you want your company to have, you can gain an upper hand over your competitors.
Are McDonald's burgers necessarily more delicious than a local burger joint on the same block? No, but McDonald's has many advantages over their smaller competitors. For one, McDonald's projects an image of cleanliness. People can disagree with the flavor of their food, but one thing they cannot argue is how clean any McDonald's restaurant is.
Second, McDonald's has uniformity in appearance with all of its restaurant chains. This creates a sense of familiarity with the customer. You feel mentally welcome, because when you visit a McDonald's in Cleveland, it is very similar to a McDonald's in Munich, Germany. McDonald's branding helps the customer quickly decide to visit their restaurant, because the customer knows exactly what they are going to get.
Domino's Pizza guarantees a fresh, hot pizza in 30 minutes, or less. Many people like the flavor of Domino's Pizza, but some think that other pizza places have more delicious pizzas. The trouble for other pizza businesses is, Domino’s branding is so strong, and they will probably always be a step ahead of their competitors. Have you seen many other pizza places that guarantee your pizza in 30 minutes, or less?
Some Final Thoughts on Color Choices in Your Personal Brand
So, what color is your brand? Your company may not have the same deep pockets for advertising as some of the companies discussed above. So, you need to develop the best branding look you can with the information you have at hand. By using color psychology to determine what color your brand is going to be, you can have a distinct advantage over your competitors by simply choosing and applying great color choices in your brand.
About Kim
Hi Kim
Great info here! Never thought about my colors before in that way… So, what do you think about cream/ off-white? Love to hear what you think: http://www.jeffreysumber.com
Thanks!!!!
Jeffrey
I love nice clean looks and white is a great ‘clean’ look!
Just to let you know how good this article was I had to take a look at my various social media accounts to verify that I was sending out the "right color brand" message! Good stuff Kim thank you.
Dr. Faith Abraham
http://www.faithabraham.com
@drfaithabraham
Awesome! So glad it was helpful!
KIM
I really liked this Kim. I am choosing colors for my brand and this has been helpful
Oge
x
Love to know your thoughts on black and red.
Both colors are very powerful and in your business, depict sexiness; which is what you are selling so this is good
Hi Came
Great breakdown of colours and what they mean.
Will have to be more careful in future.
“So, what color is your brand?”
I guess it’s the colour of my WordPress theme – have to think about it.
Check out my site and tell me what you think.
Hi Kim,
Great post – as you say colour plays an incredibly important part in how your brand is perceived. My associate creative director @suebrettell and I often discuss colour at great length when working on personal or corporate branding for a client.
She spend quite some time making getting the colour palette just so before passing it over along with guidelines.
Often when looking at the colours people use on their web sites and publication material it is quite clear that they haven’t taken the time to research the effects that good & bad colour choice can have.
Over here in the UK just getting people to acknowledge that they have and are a brand in the first place is quite a major hurdle – there is often the association that branding is somehow connected with spin or “fancy decoration”.
Thanks for sharing, have a great weekend,
Alex
Very interesting. My branding is many colours, but my website built on three colours, black, white and red. The many colours are to do with me being different and creative. The black solid – or reliable (I hope that is what is says rather than bad!!) and red is my passion and energy. Interested in the White. Fortitude is written in white, to stand out on the black, but it is the font which is meant to denote strength and a solid dependability alongside the creativity and something different. Be interested if you agree.
Hi Kim!
Wow, I Love this article. I wish I would have had this before I did my website. I know you probably get asked this all the time, but would you mind looking at my website. I am wondering if it is to bland ? I look forward to hearing from you.
You didn’t leave your website?
I'm delighted with my color choice: Yellow – Yellow represents creativity, caution, intellect, warmth, light, energy and joy. I think it represents my business well ~ Sunshine …..
I love this article, Kim! Back many years ago, I was very interested in color therapy (along with many other therapy modalities). Some of this awareness we are "sort of" taught along the way. A good example would be never to wear black to an interview because the person hiring will view you as too powerful etc. But I think, for the most part, it isn't something we often think about. I learned a great deal when I was interested in color therapy and integrated into the classroom as much as possible. I've seen some very interesting social science projects about color over the years. At any rate, very good article and a "need to know" aspect of branding.
Thanks Sharon!
We at Tupperware use pink Mainly. Didn't see your Thoughts on that choice …Thanks .great article :-)
Pink is a combination of red and white. The quality of energy in pink is determined by how much red is present. White is the potential for fullness, while red helps you to achieve that potential. Pink combines these energies. Shades of deep pink, such as magenta, are effective in neutralizing disorder and violence. Some prisons use limited deep pink tones to diffuse aggressive behavior.
Pink provides feelings of caring, tenderness, self-worth and love, acceptance.
Put some pink in your life when you want:
calm feelings
to neutralize disorder
relaxation
acceptance, contentment
Great article .. my brand color is best described as purple. Please check out my site and let me know what you think. http://www.frannabari.com
Thanks
Franna
Love purple myself as you can see
Great information shared, thank you Kim! Any advice on creating a mark?
Hi!
I am a start up business and I am about to get my website (www.LuxForMe.com) and I would like to use Gold as my main color. I am trying to represent Luxery and appeal to women (being as it is an intimate apparel company) ages 24-34.
After reading your article, I opened up my mind to the color purple as well. Do you think creme, gold, and royal purple as my main staple colors?
I would live your opinion as a business person and as a woman. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Alicia Berg
Lux For Me LLC.
That sounds like a wonderful combination for what you are looking for!