How Do I Decide What Colors to Use for My Brand?

Your brand's colors are the first things customers see, making them crucial in creating a good first impression. Colors elicit emotions and feelings that are a key driver to the decision-making process. Therefore, the colors you choose for your brand are imperative as they influence your consumer's decisions. The big question is, how do you decide on the colors to use for your brand? Here is a quick guide.

Know What You're Trying to Communicate

A clear understanding of what you want to convey to your target audience is fundamental to choosing your brand color. It would be best to define your brand's personality and essence, as this will guide you in choosing your brand's color. Couple this with your brand goals, and you'll have an easy time eliciting emotion and enhancing engagement. Once you've established that, you need to understand what various colors depict and the emotions they bring about.

Understanding the Psychological Color Principle

Every color has its unique meaning and specific emotion attached. You should select colors that seamlessly blend with what your brand is about. For instance:

• If your brand is food-related, you can choose colors that draw attention and invoke appetite. Such colors include red, orange, and yellow.
• If you're running a health and wellbeing company, blue can work wonders for your brand, as it induces trustworthiness and portrays a sense of cleanliness and responsibility.
• For the fashion and beauty industry, red, orange, pink, or black can invoke emotions like passion, excitement, confidence, sophistication and portray a glamorous scene.
• For a tech-related brand, blue could show you're trustworthy and intelligent. Orange invokes the feeling of optimism and friendliness, while purple may depict you're qualified and creative.

Look at Your Competitors' Colors Choices

Almost all brands use their brand colors on logos, websites, emails, social media outlets, in-store spaces, vehicles, and staff uniforms. You can look at the colors used by other brands you compete with. That will help and guide you to choose a unique color scheme that will see your brand stand out and make it easily recognizable and distinguishable if your product is on the same shelf or online-based sales websites as those of your competitors. Choosing a unique color also has a long-lasting effect on clientele, as they will always associate the color with your brand.

Create a Color Palette

It's wise to create a color palette to have a uniform color choice throughout your branding. You can individually choose the colors yourself or use online-based tools to generate a color palette. To create one:

• The first step is to choose the primary color. That's the main color that your consumers will associate with your brand. It would help if you chose a color that embodies your brands' character, personality, goals, and target audience.
• The second step is to choose secondary colors. You can pick between 2 and 5 colors that will complement your main color. They can appear next to your color or independently. You're free to choose colors that belong to the same family as the primary color, different shades or tints, or go for colors with an equally vibrant hue.
• Lastly, select a neutral color. It could be either white or black that you'll use for the written text on the background of most of your assets.

With the above steps, you'll be able to choose a unique color scheme that makes your brand recognizable and unique in online and offline spaces.