The Role of Colour Psychology in a Powerful Brand

How important is the role of colour in shaping the way we perceive a brand? In this episode, I'm breaking it all down. I touch on how colour evokes specific emotions and associations, and why choosing the right palette is crucial for aligning with your brand’s strategy, target audience, and cultural context.

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Chapters

• 0:03 The Power of Color Psychology
• 15:27 The Impact of Color Perception

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

you're listening to Brandon butter a straight-talking occasionally in your face. No BS branding podcast for modern marketers and business owners here, for those who want to understand the influence and power of branding and how pairing associations, consumer behavior and design thinking can impact what people see, think and feel. I'm your host, tara Ladd, the sometimes funny, sometimes vulnerable and often unapologetically blunt founder and creative director of brand and design agency. You're One and Only.

Speaker 1: 0:42

There seems to be a real interest in the role of colour psychology when it comes to visual comms, and so it should be, because it's actually quite a nuanced conversation. It interests me, I guess, because a lot of people know the influence of visuals and why colour is really important, but I always ask them follow-up questions and they don't seem to know the answer. And so today I want to talk about the importance of color psychology but, more importantly, associations and emotion. So when we're choosing colors, if we're talking about communicating with an audience, it's so important to understand the strategy of the brand, the direction of the brand and how you actually want to set the perception Because, like everyone's saying, color psychology has a huge role in how we feel and how we relate and, more importantly, how we shape and perceive things. We often see these little diagrams that show images or brands that say this equals that and this equals this and it's nuanced. So I'm going to start by saying that colors do omit associations and stereotypes, but that's based off the narrative that we've set for those, and they change meaning based on where you live and the cultures that you are brought up in. For instance, western and Eastern civilizations may have very different skews of what color means, and then we wrap in cultural appropriation and it changes again. So it's so important to understand who your audience is, where you're promoting your product or your service or your brand in general, and how you intend to set the perception of what you want people to think about you.

Speaker 1: 2:49

For instance, just say you're a masculine mechanic I think I've used this example before and you have pastel, pink and purple as your brand colors. You have every right to go and use those. In fact, it's quite ballsy to do so. But there's something that you need to take into consideration, and that is stereotypes and associations are preconceived. You can't just change those in a day, and it actually requires education to do that, the same as narratives and what we've seen change over years and years and years and years of change. What that means is that on first glance, it sets a perception, it sets a meaning and an unspoken language and without knowing I mean if you are targeting an all women, I mean if you are targeting an all women audience that fit within a specific stereotype box, stereotyped box, you'll probably attract them and that's. But that comes down to the exact thing that I'm about to speak about, and that is understanding who you're targeting, where you're placed, how you're positioned, what your differentiation is and how you intend to create that narrative. If you're just choosing those, your differentiation is and how you intend to create that narrative. If you're just choosing those colors for the sake of choosing those colors, you really need to dive a little bit deeper into understanding the nuance of color, what it means to be associated with them and what kind of unconscious perceptions are being set based on that color being shown.

Speaker 1: 4:22

For instance and I use this as an example as well if you had a dental surgery that was yellow and black, how would that make you feel? And I used this in a panel that I spoke at a couple of months ago, and I visibly saw the reactions of people's faces without them even noticing that they did that, and so they scrunched up their faces and were like that's gross. And it was like interesting, because what do the colors yellow and black mean to you when you're speaking about the dentist? So there's preconceived meanings, as I said, that come to mind when you think of a dentist. You want clean teeth. You think of almost every dental surgery has a tooth with a sparkle graphic on the front and a toothbrush. It showcases clean. There's blues, mints, whites. All of that is indicative of the environment in which you expect to be.

Speaker 1: 5:22

In the white, you know multiple things the white teeth clean, sterile. The dental jackets, all of even the little like paper towel things that they put down to put their utensils on Utensils Is that what they're called? Their tools, I'll say down on, are blue in most cases, or they they're white, and so these are things that you see, right, they're narratives that have been set, visual narratives have been set, visual languages that are unspoken, that shape an already existing narrative, and so when you're choosing colors for your brand, it's really important to understand the category that you're in, the market that you're attracting, the existing industry that you're in. If you are doing something very ballsy, you can absolutely change the game. For instance, our freight forwarding client. We injected bright fuchsia into their palette. However, we also kept a navy blue and a tree green, but then we had red and yellow. So their color was very bright and bold and we did include a disruptive color.

Speaker 1: 6:36

However, there was still some conformity in the palette, and that's because you can't just change how people are going to see you. You need to educate them on that. So there needed to be like a stepping stone process. It's just like anything that you put out with communication. Say, you change your logo tomorrow and you just start changing the communication with a new logo on the front and there has been no education on doing that. If it's been completely changed, people won't be able to identify you, and we saw this with the Tropicana rebrand. They invested millions into a rebrand and took their orange off the front of. Well, they had an orange, but they had their existing visual of an orange with a story in it. That was removed and replaced with a different graphic and people actually didn't identify it. The brand had changed so much that that had become a core association to that brand's visual identity that people then recognized and recalled that. When it wasn't there anymore. People simply didn't think that it was available and chose something else.

Speaker 1: 7:47

And we seem to forget that, when we're communicating, especially visually, that these are things that are building pathways in our brains that create that sense of familiarity Familiar, I can never say that word that sense of being familiar, the mere exposure effect at play here the more you see something, the more it ingrains in the mind. It's like walking a new path in a rainforest or in a bushwalk. It's like walking a new bushwalk. It's like walking a new bushwalk trail and you walk it over and over and over and over again and then eventually it will carve its way out. But if you take new routes every time, it's going to be harder to find that path. It's the same as how our brains work when we're trying to articulate, I guess, recognition and recall.

Speaker 1: 8:42

And so when it comes to colors, it's a lot to try and rework a narrative. It would require a lot of attention, a lot of narrative, and it can be done. It absolutely can be done. But you can't just go and pick a color because you like it, because it may mean something to someone else. Colors to you may mean something completely different to someone else. For instance, I love the color yellow. A lot of people hate it. I am not sure why, but I really love the color yellow, but a lot of people hate it, and I know this because every time we put yellow into a ballot, so many people ask us to remove it.

Speaker 1: 9:18

But it's important to know the audience and the demo that you're attracting, because, if you look at yellow in the wider scheme of things, yellow, in terms of a fun and vibrant brand, can represent happiness and energy and all of those associations that come with it Summer warmth. However, like I just said, if you're talking about a dental surgery and you use yellow, it represents mold and decay and you know the vast contrast of all of the things that you do not want your teeth to be or look like. We have whitening products to remove that yellow. They use that as a negative when speaking about smoking. Is that your teeth would go yellow? Is that your teeth would go yellow? And so these are the things that we need to be very cautious of when creating color schemes or colorways for your brand, and understanding the role of perception and what it is that you're actually communicating.

Speaker 1: 10:18

That hasn't been spoken, because visuals are 90 well, 90 of the brain's information is visuals, if you can see, and your brain processes images 60 000 times faster than words, and so when you're looking at it in terms of color, looking at things would attract you more. That's why, when there's a sense of urgency, you will see red, or environment, you will see green and navy. Blue has a real connection with loyalty, and you'll see this through uniforms of authority, police pilots, anyone that's in a higher position usually has a Navy uniform, but these all are all really important. Could you imagine if you saw a police officer in a bright yellow suit? It just would not, it just would not work. And that doesn't mean that it can't ever be done, but it means that these preconceived stereotypes that are already in our brains, these narratives that already exist, would tell us that that looks wrong. It would tell us that it's weird, it's out of character, it's not within the conformities of what we know, and this is why it's important to understand the past, it's important to understand cultural nuance and it's important to understand semiotics, which is the role of, or the language of universal, or the universal language of signs and symbols, and how they play a big role in the way that we interpret communication. Even graphics, facial expressions, all play a big role in those first impressions that we have when we see communication.

Speaker 1: 12:16

So when you're choosing colors, there'll be a bunch of things that you need to take into consideration. If you were to consider kids, they're more attracted to those primary colors and you'll see everywhere that they will have those. Google use them, the ABC one, two, threes are always in the red and the blue and the green and you know it's rgb, it's like the the foundational primary colors. Then you look at like complementary colors at the color wheel and the contrasting colors and which colors are opposite each other. So you got your complementary colors are blue and orange and purple and yellow, and red and green are opposite each other on the color wheel, but then you're looking at contrast as well. So you need to then understand the brightness and the darkness. You have colors that are too close in tonal value. If you can see them, that's fine, but there are so many other people that are visually impaired and so then you need to not look at the colors that you're choosing.

Speaker 1: 13:11

You're actually looking at the depth of the contrast and the hue itself in how that looks for other people, the core thing you should actually be looking at first depth of the contrast and the hue itself in how that looks for other people. The core thing you should actually be looking at first and foremost is the contrast of the color. So if you do choose to have a color palette and you like the colors that you've chosen, it's important to make sure that they're the right depth. The first contrast needs to be different. So if someone can't see your things or they're using a contrast converter on their website that they're seeing that differentiation buttons, especially, are really important for this, especially a new website, but also to really point out how you use color, and using colors that are too close can actually be really hard on the eye. It can be a disadvantage. If you're using the wrong colorway, you can set the wrong perceptions.

Speaker 1: 14:00

There's there's actually such a deep, deep, deep conversation, but it's something that I will be talking in depth about. We have the laboratory obviously coming out. We focus on brain, which is the behavior and people. Then we focus on brand, which is dna and strategy, and then part three is design, which we go right into depth about this stuff because it's so in depth, it's nuanced. We've got a bunch of different things to take into consideration. There's like male, female, gaze, color appropriation. It's just not a one post thing. If you're interested in that, I would highly recommend jumping on board the laboratory waitlist and also jumping onto the email, because we talk about stuff like this as well, more so how psychology is used in brands and campaigns.

Speaker 1: 14:48

But for now I hope that kind of paved your way into the questions that you kind of need to be asking. So if you were to have, I guess, some core takeaways, it's understanding your audience, who it is that you're trying to attract. It's then understanding your industry and what core stereotypes already exist within that industry and seeing what you think could be the boundary of, I guess, out of the box, thinking how far could you push it before people then become unfamiliar? Because you can do that, you can create something that is so different. People then just don't even recognize what it is. And then, of course, it's understanding what perception that you want to lead.

Speaker 1: 15:27

If you're trying to set a specific intention for us at, you Want it Only, it is like rebellion and attention and edginess, and so by doing that we've chosen black, white, taupe and red and the accent colors being yellow and teal, and they're really important to that perception that you want to lead. So, if you're thinking about rebellion, usually there's a big red involved, because it's like urgency and it's attention and it's energy and it's bold and there was a whole thought process that went into that. And then you've also got fonts, which again is a whole different conversation. But, like you can see the role of visuals and how that really changes the way that you see things. You see this if you were to go and pick packaging. This is why people inject a lot of money into packaging, because it does set a perception and if the product doesn't align with what's on the outside of the box, like you could have the best looking product. Actually, if you have the best product inside the box, but the outside of the box, the box itself isn't designed well, people are not going to choose it. So it's important to understand the role of color, the nuance of color and the perception that you want to lead by.

Speaker 1: 16:39

For now, we will talk about this more in depth later, but if you do have a question, know where to find me. Slip in on either my personal I am Tara Ladd on Instagram, or you're one and only underscore au and I will talk to you next week. Did you like that episode? I hope so because if you did, why don't you head over to whatever platform you listen on and rate and review? It's much appreciated and helps others know what we're about. If you want to follow us, you can find us at yourwannanonly underscore au on Instagram.