Try this exercise with me. Close your eyes and picture a color that makes you feel peaceful. Take a deep breath breathing in that color. As you exhale slowly breathe out any other colors. The PF team tried this exercise just a few weeks ago at our in person team retreat. After the exercise we shared what colors we breathed in and what colors we breathed out. Quite a few of us said blue and green for the peaceful colors and almost all of us saw red as one of the colors we exhaled out. It’s interesting the way colors can affect your mind without giving it much thought. In the same way colors can affect your mood, they also affect your branding.
Whether you are rebranding or just starting up a new brand you need to consider what colors you will choose. You want your brand colors to have a strong emotional connection to your audience. Choosing colors for your brand goes much deeper than “yellow is a pretty color” or “ I really like the color pink.” When designing a logo or choosing colors for your brand both come back to who you are and what message you want to get across to your audience. A color that fits your personal preference may also be a terrible choice for your business.
Colors can influence the decisions your prospects and clients make
Just as we experienced in the exercise above, blue and red give totally different feelings and responses. You want the colors you choose to create a certain feeling and response that best communicates who you are as a firm and what your clients will experience when they work with you.
Just as colors can influence how someone feels they can also influence the decisions that people make. The feelings a client has about your brand simultaneously affects the decisions they will make about your firm. If your client has a positive happy feeling when they see your brand and brand colors they ultimately will trust you sooner, get in contact faster and purchase quicker. The opposite can also happen. If your brand and colors give them an anxious or upsetting feeling it will cause them to pull back and hesitate. Emotions are powerful and have the ability to sway a person one way or another.
That’s why it’s important to understand a little about the effect each color can have on a person and the meanings of colors. Even different brightnesses and shades of each color can drastically affect how someone feels. Take a look at this color wheel below and learn about what different colors mean for you brand:
This color wheel helps you wrap your head around the basics of color theory. There is no hard and fast rule here. Colors and emotions are closely linked but not all people react the same way. A color that may make one person happy could cause another person to feel anxious depending on past experiences. That’s why it’s so important to dig deep into who your ideal clients are and specifically how they might react to certain colors. There are times when you may need to trust your gut instinct and strictly choose colors based on the emotional connection you know a specific color can evoke with your audience.
This may depend on a niche you specialize in, or a specific personality type of client you work with. For example, Fearless Financials has very bright and colorful brand colors and works with trendy independent businesses. Myers Clark however, has more serious and professional brand colors that work with innovative and growing tech businesses. Figure out who you want to serve is key to identifying what colors might relate best with them.
Brand colors help you to build connections, faster
You will show your brand colors every time you use your brand: your website, your social posts, your proposals, your team handbook…and everywhere in between. By using the same colors in all of your marketing, you will strengthen both your brand identity and your brand awareness. You will build trust with your clients and cause them to make their decisions faster.
And that’s exactly why brand colors matter. Brand colors evoke a powerful emotion within people that causes them to react one way or another. Ideally you want your client to react to your brand colors positively and with the support of your brand create strong connections. Colors are needed to make these connections.
As we are learning, colors carry many different emotions. You can read more about how to choose the best colors for your brand to learn even more about what each color says about your firm using examples of how clients have used colors or a combination of colors to evoke a specific emotion.
Start by thinking about what emotions you want your brand to evoke for your audience. Having values and knowing your niche client is a great place to start and our creative team at PF can help answer these questions to get you started.
Fill out the discovery diagnostic and share with us how well you’ve figured out who you are and what message you want your brand to share.