Whether you’ve realized it or not, color psychology is quite real. Different colors play an integral role in how brands are perceived when they’re used in company logos and other marketing materials. If you’re trying to appeal to a specific type of audience or to gain the trust of a particular demographic, studying color meanings can help you accomplish these goals. Here’s our quick guide to color psychology and how you can use it to your advantage.
What is Color Psychology?
Known primarily for the study of colors in relation to how they can influence human behavior, color psychology is a field that attempts to determine how specific colors may affect our day-to-day decisions. This includes decisions made to purchase something – or to not purchase it.
The rationale and function of how colors influence people’s buying patterns is relatively complex. The truth is that the meanings of these colors impact on our gut preferences when it comes to liking one color over another, though there are several factors in play that can also influence how people perceive specific colors and the emotions they elicit.
Color Psychology and Its Role in Marketing
Color has the ability to evoke feeling and incite emotion. This is why choosing specific colors to represent your business, such as in your logo branding and your marketing materials, can make such a major difference in the success of your company’s marketing efforts.
Strategic use of colors in your company marketing can spell the difference between blending into the crowd or standing out from it. Choosing correctly helps enhance the reputation of your brand, but beware – choosing poorly can damage your brand reputation just as easily. This makes understanding color psychology so crucial before designing any marketing materials for your business.
Different Colors and How They Influence Others
Color psychology concerns every color in the rainbow and how humans perceive those colors through an emotional lens. Let’s touch on each color in general to reveal some of the most common emotions associated with these different hues.
- Red: Great at capturing attention, red is often associated with action, energy, danger, passion, and excitement. Many brands use red to indicate a call to action or for a sale icon. Red also indicates danger, so be careful to not over-use this particular color.
- Pink: Most often associated with femininity by Western culture, pink often evokes those same qualities. Feminine traits, for better or worse, are usually interpreted as softness, playfulness, love, sympathy, or even immaturity. It’s highly common for girls’ toys marketing to make heavy use of pink.
- Orange: When it comes to balance, success, enthusiasm, adventure, and creativity, orange tends to elicit these emotions the most often. Using orange is considered an excellent way to inject a fun or playful emotion. It’s capable of drawing the eye quite well, but without the intensity of red.
- Yellow: Emblematic of sunshine, yellow is often used to indicate optimism, positivity, happiness, and warm summer weather. It’s common to use yellow as a highlight color much in the same way as orange but be aware that many shades of yellow are interpreted as a warning sign, such as in road signs.
- Green: The color of money, green is often associated with generosity and success. It also shares an affinity for nature and often is used to indicate good health, fertility, or abundant growth. There are few negative associations with green besides perhaps jealousy, often from the expression “green with envy”.
- Blue: tied closely to the bluest things we encounter in our life, the sky and the sea, blue often indicates peace, trust, calmness, harmony, and stability. Using blue in logos or branding can enhance these emotions in your audience. However, blue is also a “cool” color, so it’s not best for generating attention.
- Purple: Long thought to be the realm of royalty, purple often leads to feelings of nobility, wisdom, nobility, power, and luxury. A little bit goes a long way – overusing purple can sometimes be misinterpreted as arrogance. This makes it best used as an accent color.
Even More Color Psychology
This isn’t everything to know about color psychology, of course. Other colors, such as black, white, gray, and brown are also used in marketing materials, and each of these colors has its own unique effect on human emotion. White, for example, is often viewed as pure and clean in Western cultures, whereas black is usually associated with elegance, power, and mystery. Brown, meanwhile, is often similar to green thanks to its association with nature, but with more of an emphasis on comfort and security.
Understanding the basics of color psychology can certainly help you begin creating marketing materials for your own company that will have better impact on generating interest in prospects and existing customers alike. That being said, it’s important to understand how to use color psychology properly, and that’s only something that comes with study and practice. That means you might need outside help.
Rely on Las Vegas Color Graphics Color Psychology-Savvy Graphic Designers
Not everybody makes it a point to study color psychology on a professional level. Lucky for you, the skilled and experienced graphic designers on staff at Las Vegas Color Graphics are masters of the field of design and layout – and that includes how to use different colors to evoke specific emotional responses in your targeted demographic!
As the premier local print provider in the Las Vegas area for more than four decades, Las Vegas Color Graphics know what goes into successful marketing materials. Our talented staff will work with you to bring your dreams to reality, helping you to create the type of marketing material that generates that perfect response in your targeted audience. Contact us today and see how we can help you!
