How Color Choice Impacts Brand Identity
Is your color palette drawing consumers in or driving them away? Color is a powerful design tool of branding that shapes emotions, perceptions, and buying decisions. The palette you choose conveys emotions, reflects your brand’s values, and helps establish a lasting connection with your audience – setting the foundation for your overall visual brand identity.
As part of our branding series to pull back the curtain on the creative process, we’re outlining our insights on color theory and describing this critical element to developing a meaningful and relevant brand identity. Color decisions are most often made alongside the creation of other brand fundamentals – like naming, logos, graphics, and the like. Although the color palette might be developed in isolation, knowing how it plays in tandem with other elements of a brand is fundamental.
The Intentionality Behind Brand Color Choices
In branding, color considerations include intentionality around how hues interact with elements like the logo, media outputs like moving images, messaging, and audio, and how color will display in different environments – from the physical store to digital platforms. While it’s uncommon for brands to have completely different brand colors for digital and physical platforms and signage, they may use subtle variations of the hue to optimize visibility for that specific medium. An example would be Starbucks using a slightly brighter green for digital.
While human response to color is often instinctual, it’s also layered and nuanced. As such, branding experts focus on uncovering how color choices impact our impressions of a brand and what kind of energy color conveys. Our response is often immediate – we either like it or don’t – and we instinctively know what color communicates to us even if we can’t always articulate it.
Creating an Ownable Brand Color Palette
Color considerations include what we call ownability. Rather than legal issues, ownability is more about creating a distinctive palette that elevates and distinguishes you within your industry – think about the iconic Tiffany & Co. blue or the striking Coca-Cola red and how the color is instantly recognizable for the brand.
A more important consideration is whether a brand can own the color in the emotional space of the consumer. Our reaction to color is often like our human response to art or music. We all have it, yet it’s not easily classified. Brand experts understand that color choice is less about justifying decisions by committee and more about finding a color to stick in the hearts and minds of the people we care about influencing.
The Nuance of Brand Color Combinations
This visual expression of the brand is instinctual, but the process of getting to the right color(s) cannot rely on instinct alone. There are millions of choices, but more important than a singular color is the myriad of color combinations that work together. Sometimes, the conversation gets distilled down to one perfect color, but the truth is it’s the relationship of a palette of colors where brands can find their signature visual look. Take, for example, Fidelity Investments’ green and black palette or Bank of America’s very American red, white, and blue scheme. We often find that our clients are focused on distinguishing among their peers yet may be reticent to take on something new with color – like using purple in financial services vs. a traditional blue. Alternatively, Ally has done a great job with incorporating a regal purple.
Determining a color is not based on a chart detailing how certain colors make you feel. Rather, looking at colors worldwide, branding experts focus on determining what emotion and energy a brand wants to convey through color, in tandem with other essentials like brand mission and vision. We want to discover where colors are on an emotional spectrum and how they tie back to the overall brand strategy. Does a brand feel conservative because of primary colors? What unique color combinations elevate and make a brand distinctive? What we are uncovering, in other words, is nuance.
The Emotional Connection Between Color and Consumers
While human beings may perceive far less variability between color gradations than other species on the planet, there is a particularly human response to color. We see energy in red, regality in purple, calm in blue, and nature in green. Let’s take a look at some colors and the emotions they elicit:
Red: Passion, excitement, energy, love, urgency, danger. Examples: Coca-Cola and Netflix.
Orange: Enthusiasm, creativity, warmth, confidence, friendliness. Examples: Nickelodeon and Home Depot.
Yellow: Happiness, optimism, youthfulness, energy, caution. Examples: Snapchat and National Geographic.
Blue: Trust, dependability, calmness, professionalism, security. Examples: IBM and American Express.
Green: Growth, health, nature, freshness, wealth, balance. Examples: Starbucks and Whole Foods.
Purple: Luxury, creativity, spirituality, mystery, sophistication. Examples: Cadbury and Twitch.
Black: Power, elegance, sophistication, authority, mystery. Examples: Prada and Chanel.
White: Simplicity, purity, cleanliness, clarity, innocence. Examples: World Wildlife Fund and North Face.
Gray: Neutrality, balance, calmness, professionalism, sophistication. Examples: Apple and Audi.
Brown: Reliability, stability, warmth, nature, earthiness. Examples: UPS and Hershey’s.
Our human relationship with color is one of the more exciting brand elements to play with. Whether our responses are more trained or more intuitive, we all know that color resonates with humans on a deeply emotional level. While color won’t give you all the answers you need for how to brand your organization, it will influence all parts of your visual brand identity.
Partner with Adrenaline to Define Your Brand’s Color Identity
Ready to create a powerful brand identity? Connect with our branding experts at Adrenaline to see how we can help set your financial brand apart.
Adrenaline is an experience design agency that creates and implements end-to-end branded experiences through creative and environmental design. We enhance our clients’ customer experiences acros digital and physical channels, from their branding and advertising to design and technology in their spaces. After transforming an organization’s brand, Adrenaline extends it across all touchpoints — from employees to the market to in-store environments. And, we focus on serving industries that sell human experiences including financial, healthcare, sports and entertainment.
