Color Branding for Businesses

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The Role of Color Psychology in Branding

You selected the right fonts for your brand in the previous section; now it’s time to add color into your business’s personality.

Colors come with different connotations. Many financial companies use blue, for example, to evoke calmness and trustworthiness. Other companies, such as those in entertainment, may use red to show energy. What’s more, the tone and saturation of the color also play a role in emotions – brighter or dimmer? Lighter or darker? These are questions you will need to consider in your decision-making process.

Color Branding for Businesses – Transcript

Branding is all about building a world for your audience to stay in as they have an interaction with your brand, and color is a big part of world-building. Think about how you feel when seeing a bright field – envisioning some yellows in there? How about a passionate or dangerous feeling image – seeing red? Selecting the right colors is essential to making sure that your customers feel the way that you want them to feel when having a positive interaction with your products or services. 

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a larger course dedicated to helping small business owners cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. If that sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe. 

We're working through creating brand guidelines for a small business, and in the last video, we talked about selecting brand fonts, and in this video, we're going to talk about selecting brand colors. Let's dive into it. 

Like brand fonts, selecting your brand's color palette is important. It will help give your customers a uniform experience when interacting with your brand and cuts down on design time when creating documents and marketing materials. You can pick successful brand colors in a few simple steps. 

Step one – revisit your brand adjectives. Before you even think about picking your brand colors, ensure that you have a clear understanding of your brand's personality so that you can communicate that personality through color. Otherwise, you'll end up overwhelmed, wading through countless color palette options without a clear purpose. Make sure to revisit the adjectives that you selected for your brand before selecting your colors. 

Step two – pick a core brand color based off of your brand personality traits. After identifying your key brand personality traits, it's time to find one color that best embodies those traits. This is where color psychology comes into play. 

Color psychology can help us understand the personality traits that people generally associate with different colors. Ever wondered, for example, why tech and finance companies tend to use blue colors with their logos? According to color psychology, cool colors tend to invoke feelings of trust, loyalty, and stability, while warmer colors are generally more evocative of energy, excitement, and positivity. Obviously, trust and stability are critical for large financial institutions. They need to be able to convince consumers that they're able to be trusted with the consumer's life savings. 

But color psychology goes even deeper than just warm and cool tones. We can go as far as to associate specific personality traits with specific hues. Go ahead and pause the video for a second and look at the various adjectives that relate to each color. Here's a brief overview of common color meanings. It's important to note that these color meanings are highly dependent upon context, personal experience, and culture – among many other things – but they're a great jumping-off point for picking your core brand color. Use this list to pick one color that best embodies your brand's personality or the feeling, mood, or experience that you want to create around your brand. 

Once you've selected the main color based off of your brand personality, we need to define the saturation and the value for that color. Generally, hues with more saturation and a brighter value are associated with younger, more energetic, and arousing feelings. And generally, hues with less saturation and darker values are associated with more mature and calm feelings. 

It's worth noting here that there are a lot of ways to go about selecting your main brand color and choosing a color palette to support that color. But if you're just starting out, I recommend using Colormind.io to select your main brand color, adjust the hue saturation and value, and select a supporting color palette. Ensure that you select a black or nearly-black color, a white or nearly-white color, and two other supporting brand colors. You can also take a deeper dive into color here to learn more about color theory and how the color really affects what colors look nice together. 

But now that we've briefly introduced you to color theory, in the next video, we'll use what we learn to select a color palette for the imaginary barbershop that we've been building throughout the course. And while we do that, you should select your own color palette for your business. 

This video is part of a step-by-step course that gives business owners all the essential information to start and operate their business. We've provided a link where you can get access to all of the free and discounted business tools that we mentioned in this course below this video. 

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next video, and if you have any questions, let us know.