The Psychology of Colors in Business Operations: How to use Color to Your Advantage

Painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky said that “color is a power which directly influences the soul.” We all know from personal experience the impact of color on our inner lives. We need only remember an especially blue sky or the vibrant colors of an autumn day to know how these shifted or even lifted our mood. But what do blue skies and autumn leaves have to do with the success of your business? As it so happens, there’s a long legacy of psychological research around the impacts of color on human behavior, and many of these insights directly translate to branding strategies that can boost your business appeal.

An intentional use of color can help you:

• Stand out from the competition with a highly recognizable brand
• Establish brand consistency
• Foster positive emotional connections with your customers
• Communicated effectively in a diverse market
• Increase the accessibility of your product

Read on for principles and tools to help you leverage the power of color in your business operations.

Use color to stand out from the competition with a highly recognizable brand

The colors you choose for your brand become your definitive market signature just as much as your logo. Consider the deep red interior of a certain department store. Even if you were led into this store blindfolded, with no opportunity to see that big target painted on the front, you’d likely know exactly where you were, all from the rich glow of those walls. The same principle of high color recognition characterizes many other Fortune 500 companies. One might even argue that one ticket to their success has been their ability to leverage color to create a recognizable brand.

Similarly, you have the opportunity to create recognition for your company by selecting a signature color. At the same time, you’ll certainly need more than one color to build your web theme and marketing materials, and this creates a natural opportunity for establishing a uniquely recognizable brand. On your website, for instance, you will need primary, secondary, and neutral colors to define the branding, navigation, and background elements. All of these elements come together to create your brand’s color scheme. Because the brain processes colors and images up to 60,000 times faster than text , visuals will be your customers' first impression of your business, so it’s important to get it right.

Before you get too invested in a particular color scheme, however, it may be valuable to pause and do a little research on the competition. Given the common associations between color and certain emotions, ideas, and even whole industries, it is possible that your competitors may have gravitated to the same colors as you. Researching before you commit gives you the chance to differentiate from the competition by defining your brand with a unique color scheme. You may opt for completely different colors from your competitors, but even subtle tweaks to hue and saturation can give your branding a distinctive tone.

Use color to establish brand consistency

Standing out from the competition doesn’t necessarily mean being loud or flashy, unless that’s your mojo. If anything, one of the most powerful techniques in branding is not volume but consistency. A way to do this is to define your color scheme from the beginning and stick with it. This palette becomes your visual style guide in the same way that you may develop a guide for fonts or the tone of your written content.

It can be useful to look at style guides developed by top design teams to get an idea of how this works. Google’s material designs is one of the most influential style guides in use today. While companies may need to develop more complicated design systems as they grow, most websites need no more than 2 to 3 primary colors, 2 to 3 secondary colors, and 2 to 3 neutral colors for backgrounds. Resist the urge to introduce additional colors. Even slight variations can distract from or break down the coherence of your presentation.

The trick here is to make your color scheme versatile and multi-purpose so that you can keep things simple but still add more elements as the need arises. For instance, if you know you’ll be running holiday banners on your website, consider how you might filter these banner images to fit in with your already-existing color scheme.

Overall, choosing a consistent palette is an important element of establishing brand coherency, which in turn boosts recognition. Consistency in your color choices can even increase your credibility as a company because it sends the message that you know who you are and what you’re about. So now that you have some principles of recognition, differentiation, and consistency in mind, how do you choose an effective color palette?

Use color to foster positive emotional connections with your customers

A good starting point in establishing your brand colors is to consider what emotions and ideas you want your customers to associate with your business. Research in color psychology indicates that people are emotionally impacted by color in some fairly predictable if not completely universal ways. In 2022, psychology today published the results of an international color-emotion association survey providing data on what colors tend to mean to people across cultures, as well as some ways these colors can be combined to further nuance the emotional effect.

In the United States, for instance, green is regularly associated with nature, growth, and balance. Because of the dollar, it has also come to symbolize growth in a financial sense. Blue is considered peaceful, restful, and caring, though sometimes also sad, and this combination may explain why it is used so frequently in the healthcare industry. Perhaps the most polarizing color, red can mean love, power, anger, or even danger, and it is widely used among fast food chains to induce hunger and a sense of urgency.

So how do you want your clients and customers to feel while interacting with your website and materials? What actions do you want them to be inspired to take? Perhaps more importantly, how do you want to feel, and what actions do you want to be inspired toward on a daily basis? After all, you’ll likely be spending more time in the presence of your brand colors than anyone else. Your small business reflects your own personality and values, so it’s important to make sure you feel good about the psychological messages you’re surrounded by and sending across to others.

There are no “good” or “bad” colors, but the nuances of color associations in different contexts can make choosing the right mix for your business a little tricky. In making branding decisions, one helpful technique is to consider the color schemes of physical spaces that match your business mission or the type of atmosphere you want to evoke. Do you want your web page to call up a redwood forest or a tech hub, the beach or a cozy coffee shop? Consider creating a vision board and selecting colors directly from a single image that best captures the feel you want. there’s even an online tool for picking out exact colors from images. Have fun!

Use color to communicate effectively in a diverse market

While studies indicate that many people have shared associations with particular color, these associations can also vary somewhat from culture to culture. For instance, yellow is generally a happy, energizing color. However, if you’re visiting Russia, don’t give someone a yellow rose – unless you’re about to break up with them! While this example may not be relevant to your particular market, the point is that it’s always useful to build awareness of the meanings your brand colors may carry in a multicultural context. As you do market research, take note of any cultures represented and learn what your potential brand colors might mean to them. In addition to local traditions and national flags, you may also want to consider the color schemes of highly recognizable organizations and social movements.

When in doubt, it never hurts to ask. Try doing a color association activity on social media or putting out a short survey to representatives of your intended market. The feedback may surprise you!

Taking the time to do this type of groundwork will only benefit you in the long run. Even if you make no changes to your branding game plan, you will still be building rapport and understanding so that you can communicate more effectively with your chosen market base.

Use color to increase the accessibility of your product

The visual challenges many people live with are also worth considering in choosing your color scheme. 8% of caucasian males are impacted by red-green colorblindness. While this statistic only accounts for one type of color blindness in one demographic, it underlines the reality that many people are living with visual challenges that impact how they interact with your website, content, and products. Color blindness, for instance, can make it difficult to navigate key interface elements. It’s much easier to click the wrong button when the red “delete” button and the green “submit” button look virtually the same. For people with low vision, it can also be difficult to read content when there isn’t enough contrast between colors.

Some easy ways to mitigate these issues are to use a color accessibility checker such as webaim to ensure that your website colors pass the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that govern internet standards. Other useful tools are plug-ins like Colorblindly , which lets you preview how your content appears to people with different types of colorblindness. In the end, building your brand with accessibility in mind goes a long way to creating a more inclusive world. Because so many people experience vision challenges, you will also be doing yourself a big favor by opening the door for a wider range of customers.

Designing your brand’s color scheme can be one of the most creative parts of establishing your business. It’s a fantastic opportunity to unleash the artist within you! At the same time, deciding on your brand’s colors is a deeply strategic activity.

By consciously applying color psychology, you have the opportunity to create a recognizable brand, stand out from the competition, and establish a consistent style. You get to create an environment that will positively influence your customer’s emotional associations with your business, communicate effectively across cultures, and enhance accessibility. You don’t need an art degree to take strategic steps to leverage color in your business operations, but you also don’t need to go it alone. Reach out for a consultation to see how Luneer can help you build an effective brand color and marketing strategy.

WRITTEN BY: DEBORAH STEVENSON