Color Psychology for Brands: A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Color for Branding

The internet has a lot to say about how color psychology affects our mood and behavior, and many companies around the world use these insights to make brand decisions such as determining their brand colors.

These decisions impact the colors used in call-to-action buttons, landing pages, and any other interactions with the consumer.

With so much content out there to give insights on how to use color, it still doesn’t seem so cut and dry.

What Message Do Different Colors Convey?

Different colors convey different meanings, and so many brands use these colors in their photography. Here are some examples of images that use colors to evoke a certain mood.

Yellow

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This color is optimistic and youthful, and it is often used to grab the attention of window shoppers.

Red

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Brands often use red to convey a feeling of energy and increase the viewer’s heart rate. It also creates a sense of urgency, which is why you see it used in clearance sales.

Blue

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Blue is a calming color that conveys trust and security. It is often used in the marketing of banks and businesses.

Black

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Black is seen to be powerful and sleek and is often used to market luxury products or services.

But, in reality, it’s incorrect to think that a single color creates one specific emotion for everyone—that’s overly simplistic.

What Does Science Have to Say About Color Psychology?

Research cited from KISSmetrics and Neil Patel for those who love stats and numbers:

• 92.6% of people say that visual dimensions are the #1 influencing factor affecting their purchase decisions (over taste, smell, etc.) according to Neil Patel
• 85% of shoppers say color is the primary reason why they buy a particular product
• 42% of shoppers base their opinion of a website on design alone
• 52% of shoppers did not return to a website because of overall aesthetics

If you use color psychology correctly, you can influence your target audience’s decision-making process by helping them feel the way you want them to feel which can increase overall conversions.

If you use color psychology correctly, you can influence your target audience’s decision-making process by helping them feel the way you want them to feel which can increase overall conversions.

By leveraging certain colors and color combinations, you can direct customer perceptions in your brand’s favor. Over time, you’ll be able to go beyond immediate conversions to create long-term brand loyalty and affinity.

So how do you use the right color to persuade your audience?

That is what we are going to cover in the rest of this article. You are going to learn:

• What is Color Psychology & How Does it Work?
• How Color Affects Our Brain
• How Color Psychology Affects Our Emotions (& Our Customers’ Emotions)
• The Power of Color Preferences
• How to Use Color Psychology to Market to Your Audience
• How Are Brands Using Color Psychology?

What is Color Psychology & How Does it Work?

“Color psychology is the study of hues as a determinant of human behavior. Color influences perceptions that are not obvious, such as the taste of food. Colors can also enhance the effectiveness of placebos. Color can indeed influence a person; however, it is important to remember that these effects differ between people.” –Wikipedia

What does this mean?

Color has the power to impact people’s decision making and behavior (as in “should I eat this?” or “should I buy this?” kind of decision making).

How Color Affects Our Brain

Colors hold a lot of influence on our emotions and attitudes towards something. In a study by Satyendra Singh from the University of Winnipeg, research showed that people make up their minds within 90 seconds of their initial interactions with people or products. Further insight shows that about 60-90% percent of the initial interaction with a product is based on colors alone and how those colors make us feel.

How Color Psychology Affects Our Emotions (& Our Customers’ Emotions)

In marketing and design, colors are thought to influence buying choices, feelings, and even memories. Yet, we are all unique, and each person’s perception of color is their own.

These two parallels make it extremely hard to choose only one color that will resonate with your entire audience. Each individual will have a different response to colors and there is no way of knowing if your perception is the same as mine.

Let’s say we went into a paint store together to look at paint chips. If you were staring at a particular shade of red and asked me what color it was, I would probably have a different answer than yours. Although you may describe the color as red, there is no way of knowing if our perception is the same. We don’t perceive colors in the same way.

Here’s another example: Do you remember the viral sensation known as The Dress in 2015? The image went viral because people all over the world disagreed over whether the dress was blue and black or white and gold. What color do you see?

Each person’s varying opinion of the color was due to our differences in perception. Color psychology has to do with understanding these perceptions.

Just like we have a particular taste in food, we all have our preferences when it comes to color. To cater an image to a particular audience, we need to understand what these preferences are.

While, of course, this can be different for everybody, there are some associations with particular colors that are a little more universal. We will take a look at these associations and preferences in more detail in the next section.

The Power of Color Preferences

Pink & Blue

Close your eyes and imagine your friend is telling about their newborn baby. They show you an image of the baby, and the baby is wearing blue.

What gender do you think the baby is?

Now, what if I said the baby is wearing pink?

In today’s society, we like to think that “pink is for girls, blue is for boys,” but in the 1800s, males and females both wore white clothing.

So, how did we get into our minds that girls like pink and boys like blue? This shift in consumer habits was created by retailers who were looking for a way to sell to parents and influence them to buy new clothes for their children.

Color psychology is compelling stuff, and companies are leveraging insights in preferences in order to market to their audience all the time.

Red

Another example is the color red. Red is probably the most researched color in the world and is regarded as a color that creates excitement and desire—or is it warning and danger?

It depends on what you read.

Different studies show that red triggers mixed emotions, and that’s the bottom line of all this—different people will feel different things when seeing the color red (or any color for that matter) because we’re different people.

We think differently about each color because of the different experiences we have in life, our culture, and the symbols we attach to each one.

If you want to use color psychology the right way (and increase conversions in the process), you need to start by looking at color perception from four different vantage points: Culture, symbolism, age, and gender.

If you want to use color psychology the right way (and increase conversions in the process), you need to start by looking at color perception from four different vantage points: Culture, symbolism, age, and gender.

Culture

Not surprisingly, color means different things to different cultures.

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In the graphic above, we can see that red has a strong association with success across multiple cultures while in others—like in Western America, Japan, or Hindu cultures—it doesn’t carry the same meaning.

In Western and Japanese cultures, red symbolizes love while in other cultures, it varies from green to yellow. Black symbolizes death in most Western countries and Japan, while in many other Asian countries white symbolizes death.

These cultural differences behind the meaning of different colors are massive and are definitely something that you need to take into consideration when designing a landing page or choosing stock photos. This data is making it clear that appropriate research must be done on your target audience before you choose which colors to use.

Symbolism

Every culture has symbols. Colors and how symbols interact with them are important to consider. Symbols carry emotional meaning, which can affect color perceptions.

What are today’s cultural symbols?

The power of symbols can be observed by looking at superheroes. They each have distinct colors associated with them.

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Most of the superheroes we are familiar with in the Western world have different ratios of the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue.

The focus on these three colors would make sense to the traditional Western market, but if your audience had different backgrounds, the meaning with the above colors might be different.

Age

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Joe Hallock noted in his research that red and blue remain high in preference throughout age changes, but other colors seem to drop in preference.

What’s interesting is the preference of green in the younger age groups and the preference of purple in the older age groups.

Be sure to consider the age group of your audience you are marketing to and use the above color data to market with the appropriate colors.

Gender

Color preference is observed within genders.

Children look to understand the world and the people around them, and we, as adults, continually reinforce stereotypes. Children also often create archetypes of what it is to be male and what is female. Eventually, men typically feel more drawn to blue, and women to the color red.

Lee Ellis & Christopher Ficek’s research revealed very significant differences between the preferences of males and females when it comes to color.

The most significant differences had to do with preferences for blue and green. Nearly half (45%) of all males chose various shades of blue as their favorite color and less than 20% chose some shade of green, only 25% of females chose blue, while about 28% chose green.

Other noteworthy gender differences were that females were more likely to choose pink and purple, while males were more partial to black (this latter finding is contrary to Silver and Ferrante (1995), who found females prefer black more than males).

How to Use Color Psychology to Market to Your Audience

Behavior Insights

It may surprise you, but a lot of people don’t use Google Analytics data to conduct a behavior analysis and make informed decisions on their audience. What a missed opportunity!

You can use your existing traffic data to understand the following metrics:

• Geographic location
• Language
• Age and gender

These metrics will help you understand what color to choose for your audience.

For example, if you want to highlight emotions that are optimistic and youthful, you could use yellow to grab attention. But, depending on the location of your customer, it may make sense to try another color to grab attention instead.

You can even take your customer research to the next level by investigating your audience for each individual product that you sell.

Survey Your Users

It’s essential to understand the voice of your customer. You can do this with surveys. Surveys are a gold mine of information that will help you understand the preferences of your audience.

Brand perception surveys are questions you can give to your existing audience to understand if they view the brand the way you do.

These questions tend to be very vague and require open-ended answers. Depending on how many people you ask, they can help you measure the positive, negative, and neutral sentiment of your brand.

The comments are especially helpful in understanding how they describe your brand and the current emotion behind it.

Here’s an example of a brand survey that shows the results:

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The words used above are linked with color so you can understand the emotional experience.

Another option with a brand survey is to ask your audience about multiple brands (including your own) to see which brand resonates with your audience.

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Google Search Console

Use Google Search Console to look into the search terms and words your audience is using on your site. This will help you identify the problem or questions they are searching for and their concerns. Both the Discover and Search Results section is a gold mine.

How Are Brands Using Color Psychology?

Let’s dive into the beauty industry, where there is a lot of competition.

Pink is a common color theme for beauty. A famous beauty blog called the Planology Blog collected a few words that are generally associated with pink. They include compassion, sincerity, happiness, optimism, and gentleness.

What’s interesting, is that while the color is associated with “femininity,” not all shades convey the same emotion.

Muted pinks convey a sense of calm (Vineyard Vines, Benefit Cosmetics, and Mary Kay)

Saturated pinks like Magenta are used to convey energy and excitement (think of brands like PINK by Victoria Secret, Lyft, and Cosmopolitan).

The last batch’s tone is pretty neutral, unassuming, and very modern. This color trend started from Glossier, a billion-dollar brand that created this hue which has now become the norm for many businesses targeting young women.

Glossier’s hue is coined “Millennial Pink” because the color resonates very well with its millennial target audience and is used heavily in their marketing efforts.

Be sure to leverage the brand colors you have chosen in your brand photoshoot.

Conclusion

To recap:

• Yes, colors have the ability to impact our customers’ decisions
• It’s not always so simple—you can’t look at colors in isolation
• To impact your audience, you need to understand preferences

Understanding what your audience wants in terms of color psychology is not as simple and straightforward as it might seem but if you use the resources that you have to try and better understand your audience, you will be able to better leverage color psychology to grow your brand.