By What are the steps every business owner must follow when picking the perfect branding color?
When creating a brand identity, picking the perfect color for your business’s branding significantly impacts its reach. Color plays a critical role in shaping how your target audience perceives your brand and, as such, can make or mar your business.
According to a Neil Patel infographic on color and marketing, 85% of shoppers place color as their primary reason for buying a product. That goes to show the power of color in evoking emotions and impulsive decision-making.
However, with so many colors and shades available, picking the perfect color for your business’s branding can become daunting. Therefore, we’ll discuss seven unique steps to picking the perfect color for your business’s branding. Whether you’re rebranding your business or starting a new one, the steps here will guide you toward sharpening your marketing efforts with the perfect brand color.
Steps to Picking the Perfect Color for Your Business’s Branding
Table of Contents
Here are seven steps to help you choose the best color for your business’s branding:
1. Identify Your Brand’s Values and Personality
The first step in picking the perfect color for your business’s branding is to identify the values and personality traits you’d want your brand to be known for. Different colors portray different meanings and evoke different emotions in the viewers’ minds.
While red depicts danger, excitement, and energy, green symbolizes sustainability and fertility, and yellow brings happiness, hope, and positive vibes. When you think of colors and the brands that use them properly to evoke the right emotions, you think about red and Coca-Cola, white, black and Apple, Cadbury and purple, etc. Think of the excitement on the faces of those who drink Coke and the minimalistic design Apple portrays in all its products, and you’d understand the impact of colors in evoking emotions.
Think about what your brand stands for and the emotions you want to evoke in your customers, and you’ll be closer to choosing the perfect brand color.
2. Understand Brand Color Terminology
You can’t create the perfect color for your business’s branding without knowing the color options available to you and how they’re represented. Knowing the proper terminology will help you communicate effectively with the design team when choosing a suitable brand color.
Therefore, to accurately choose the color that communicates your brand value and personality, you must understand the meaning and implementation of color shades, tints, tones, codes, and other terms.
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3. Consider Your Target Audience
Your target audience is essential when choosing a color for your brand. Picking a color that resonates with them shows how much you know and care about their preferences.
Think about the age group, gender, and cultural background of your target audience, and it becomes easier to pick a color that appeals to them. Pink, for instance, appeals to girls, but as they age, their preferences change. The same applies to boys, men, women, and people from different cultural backgrounds.
4. Study Your Competitors
You shouldn’t omit this vital step when picking a color for your business’s branding. Certain industries are known with specific colors, and veering off that path might incur drawbacks for your business. Most financial services firms, for instance, are associated with the blue color, while fire service departments use bright colors like red and yellow.
Study your competitors to know which colors are predominant in their branding and the different shades of colors they use. Then choose colors that align with industry standards and tweak them to make your brand stand out.
5. Test Different Color Combinations
Once you’ve studied your competitors and come up with suitable brand color preferences, the next step is to make the designs and come up with different color combinations. Experiment with as many color combinations as possible until you create a perfect match for your brand.
The general rule of design is not to use more than three colors in branding. This ensures your designs are simple and convey your brand message with ease. Top world brands know this, which is why 95% of them use just one or two colors in their brands. However, if you must use more than three colors in your branding, ensure you keep it simple. Keeping it simple ensures your brand is easily recognizable by your target audience.
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6. Get Feedback
Now that you’ve created different color combinations, the next step is to share them with colleagues, friends, and family for feedback. Feedback is essential to help you make informed decisions and avoid mistakes, as you might have a bias toward a particular color combination.
If you’re just rebranding, you can conduct a survey with your customers and find out what colors they’d like your brand to be recognized with. The feedback will help you know what your customers want from you, enabling you to create a color that resonates with them.
7. Consider the End Product
The practicality of your color choices matters a lot in branding. While a color combination might look great to the eyes, how it appears in different mediums, such as print, online, and on merchandise, matters greatly.
You must ensure your brand’s color is versatile and works well in different applications.
Conclusion – Steps to Picking the Perfect Color for Your Business’s Branding
Your brand color doesn’t just communicate your brand’s value and personality; it also helps you create a stronger emotional connection with your target customers. Striking that emotional connection with your customers gets you engagements and conversions, and the color is your greatest weapon here.
Businesses that understand that color is an essential aspect of branding and should be created with the customers in mind tend to have a more competitive advantage over their competitors.
