Marcus Richards
While color is an aesthetic element, it is also a great branding tool. Color has a way of bringing out emotions. As a business entity, branding determines your product’s success in the market. That’s why it’s important to have uniformity and creativity when branding your logo, website, and anything else that represents your company. What colors you choose reflect the brand’s identity and play a significant role in marketing.
For businesses with brick-and-mortar stores, you can incorporate the brand colors on the staff uniforms, product packaging, and store design. Find tips below for choosing a color palette that best suits you for the best branding results.
1. Build Your Brand Identity
The colors you pick portray your brand identity. It would be best if you decided on how you want your consumers to view your brand. What products are you dealing with, and would the theme be playful or formal? Moreover, it would help if you created a color palette that clearly defines your company’s core values and what it stands for.
One way to choose your brand identification is by laying down a few adjectives that best describe your products and ensuring they set you apart from your competition. You must remember that you’re not just branding because everyone else is, but you are doing branding for results.
2. Identify Your Inspiration Points
Look around for color inspiration. Research your competitors’ choice of color and what makes those specific colors work for them. You can search on the internet for colors that resonate with your vision.
Alternatively, go through some of the color generators available online and find out what colors work for your niche. These color generators assist you in picking colors you can blend and give you lessons on identifying the right shades and color hues.
3. Understand Color Meanings
Different colors represent different emotions, so you must understand the different color meanings. Mixing a color with another one brings out a different color from the original idea. Blue combined with pink comes out as playful, while blue blended with gold means luxury and royalty.
Sometimes, your color choice will depend on the industry you work in. Certain colors are associated with specific industries. For example, the health and wellness industry and the high-tech industry have a strong preference for blue. The food industry prefers warm colors like orange and red because they are inviting colors, while the fashion industry prefers black to symbolize glamour and sophistication.
4. Pick Your Primary Color
After you have gone through the color meanings, you can choose a primary color that will be your main color. From there, you can play with the different shades of color that are available and keep trying the different shades until you find something suitable.
5. Pick Your Secondary Colors
Since you may have already decided on what primary color to use, the next step is identifying your secondary colors. You may use the secondary colors independently or choose one that complements your primary color. If you don’t know how to go about it, there are color schemes that you can choose from when pairing primary and secondary colors. Some of the color schemes are:
- Monochromatic Scheme – These are used to enhance the primary color. You mix shades of the original color to blend. If you choose pink as your primary color, you can play with shades like fuchsia and baby pink.
- Contrasting Schemes – You can go for this scheme if you aim for a color pop and a modern look. You can achieve this by picking a color in its opposite direction in the color wheel, for example, yellow and purple.
- Analogous Scheme – With the analogous scheme, you use colors close to each other in the color wheel. If you use orange as your primary color, you can add yellow or red as the secondary color.
6. Choose Your Neutral Color
Some business owners focus so much on choosing other colors that they forget to pick a neutral color. Examples of neutral colors are white, beige, gray, or black. These can be used for any writing that may appear on your products.
7. Do A Color Test
Put all the chosen colors together, and try them out to see the final look. Keep testing until the colors reveal your vision, the intended brand message, and the company’s identity. Moreover, you can use color contrast checkers and analyzers available online just to be sure.
Conclusion
When choosing colors for your new business, you must keep it simple but purposeful. There are other things that may come into play, like taste and preferences, but whatever colors you decide, make sure they represent your brand and the message you aim to bear. Finally, remember to be careful not to come up with something that might look exactly like your competitors’ branding.
