The Impact of Color

As you are getting ready to go into that big board meeting, someone suggests you wear your “red power tie”. Or when you search for earth friendly products, you see a blanket of green in all of the logos and marketing material. Have you ever noticed that most fast food restaurants’ logos incorporate yellow and red?

So does the color of your logo or your next service offering make that big of a difference?

You Bet!

Different colors will bring about different emotions, which will ultimately impact the decisions of your clients. Let’s take a look:

Red: Power, strength, stimulation
The color red is a strong warm color and can even raise your pulse.

Orange: Happiness, creativity and warmth
It is a great color to catch people’s attention. It is a strong color, but not quite as abrasive as red. This is one you want to use in moderation; too much can come across as immature.

Yellow: Sunshine, joy and energy
This is another attention grabbing color – hence yellow taxi cabs and caution tape. It can evoke pleasant and cheerful feelings – but too much can be overload. Many times it is looked at as a playful color – which makes it not a great choice for an item of prestige.

Green: Nature, fresh, growth and money
Considering the color of most trees and grass, people associate the color green with nature and growth. There is a calming characteristic to the color green.

Blue: Calming, stability, wisdom
Blue is considered a masculine color. It is the most favored color of people. It does reduce tension and fear and even slows the pulse rate. It is great for corporations and financial service companies to use blue to tap into it’s stability and calming effect.

Purple: Wealth, extravagance, royalty
Purple became associated with wealth due to the great expense it took to make it before synthetic dyes. It used to be so expensive, only rulers and royalty could afford it. For a while, Queen Elizabeth even forbade anyone who was not royalty to wear the color purple.

Now, after reading at all of this you might feel a bit more overwhelmed when it comes to selecting the color scheme for your next product or service. Take a deep breath – you can do this.

First, ask yourself, what emotion do you want people to feel when they see your product? Are selling something that is earth-friendly or creative? Is your product gender specific or gender neutral? Second, look at some similar products and services and see what colors they are using. Then compare those to the color descriptions listed above. Third, create a few different colorways and see which one works. Combining colors is a very complex art. However, just having this added awareness will help you to select a colorway that will elicit the desired emotional reaction in your client – helping you to achieve greater success in your business.