An integral part of branding is ensuring you have an instantly recognisable image, one that matches across the board. This includes having an appropriate colour palette. But how do you go about picking the best colours for your business? At Dawn Creative, our ethos is to bring brands out of the dark and into the light. That’s why we understand exactly how important colour and light – or the lack thereof – are to your branding and image. To explain more, we’ve put together this guide to selecting the perfect colour palette for your brand.
The importance of colour palettes and branding
Human beings are drawn to colour.
It’s a huge part of the world around us, and an essential factor when it comes to sight, understanding and even emotion.
For a business, that means colour becomes an important part of branding, whether you intend it to or not.
For that reason, it’s important to get your colour palette right from the start.
The colour scheme you pick can come to define the way your business is seen by customers.
Or, vice versa, the way your company acts could define the colour you’ve chosen for your brand. Either way it’s important to know the nuances of colour when you’re developing your branding, because a recognisable colour scheme can improve brand recognition by up to 80 per cent.
Colour and psychology
Human psychology plays a crucial role in the way we perceive colour, and we often associate specific colours with certain emotions or individual feelings.
Red is a bright colour often used as a warning in dangerous places or on stop signs.
We see it every day on traffic lights, telling us to stop.
Green, on the other hand, is the colour that tells us it’s safe to proceed.
But it’s more complex than this.
We also associate colours with different emotions.
Red not only means ‘stop!’ but it also means ‘love’.
The colour green is often used to promote healthy products, as well as being used on traffic lights. It’s also the colour that the human pupil reacts to least, which is why it’s used in operating theatres to help relax the patient.
Getting the psychology behind your colour right can go a long way to promoting your company’s values and intentions, as well as helping to attract customers using an already well-established system of human-colour associations that have been around thousands of years.
What are your brand values and identity?
With human psychology in mind, it’s important to pick a colour scheme that matches your brand values and identity.
For example, if you’re marketing a healthy new snack to a vegetarian market, the colour green will help potential customers to quickly identify your offering as wholesome, natural and something they should try.
If you’re looking for friendly, welcoming branding for kids’ toys, choosing black won’t help your image.
On the other hand, black could be the perfect colour base for a management brand that wants to look sleek, established and professional.
Knowing your target audience can really help to define which colour schemes are best for your brand.
Are you safe and dependable or are you quirky and fun? Establishing your audience’s interests and existing colour associations is essential.
Before choosing a colour scheme, your business needs to ask these important questions to establish a brand identity, brand values, and a target audience. You can’t simply pick your favourite colour or that of your favourite football team.
Colourful recognition
Just like logos or like advertising slogans, customers quickly come to associate the colour of your brand, products, labelling or packaging with the service you provide, good or bad.
This happens to such an extent that certain colours are automatically associated with brands, such as red for Coca Cola or orange for easyJet.
Brand recognition can benefit massively from picking the right colours.
But in a world where advertising and established brands are everywhere, you have to choose carefully.
There’s a reason why the major supermarkets have different, competing colour schemes.
If both ASDA and Tesco had bright green colour schemes, no one would be able to tell the difference at a quick glance.
For that reason, it’s important to not only know what people associate a colour with, but what colours your competition are already using.
It’s in the detail
When we talk about colour, it’s not enough to look at the basic primary colours or colours we think we recognise.
Colour has a huge spectrum – and it’s often defined differently by different people.
The shade and tone of your colours are just as important to branding, as choosing between red, purple or green.
Is your brand colour pink or is it a light red? The difference, while subtle, could mean enormously different things to your customers.
Consistency is key
Choosing the perfect colour palette for your brand will instantly help you establish a greater presence among your target market.
But once this colour scheme is established, it needs to become a consistent feature of your brand. Your colour palette, be it a single, strong colour or a vibrant array of different complementary or contrasting colours, needs to be easily replicable across the board.
The colour scheme should be everywhere, and you’ll have to consider whether it’s appropriate and if it works at all levels of your business.
Consistency is key, so you might need to trial different colours for uniforms and logos, or different colour combinations that work for advertising and logos, as well as workplaces or customer-facing areas.
If you want to show people who you are, what you’re passionate about, and how you do things differently, then get in touch with us today.
Colour is a key part of your business image, so why not let the professionals take your brand’s colour palette to the next level?
The team at Dawn Creative is ready to help you find the perfect colour scheme.
If you don’t love our work, we’ll even give you your money back!
What have you got to lose?
Call us on 0161 711 0910, or send an email to wakeup@dawncreative.co.uk
