How to Choose a Color Palette That Fits Your Brand Perfectly

Mar 12, 2021

Color is just as important as a unique brand logo in marketing. The right color choice for your brand can bring huge sales by capturing customer attention and evoking an emotion that potentially influences a buying decision.

But it’s not that simple. You can’t just pick a color for your brand out of gut instinct or just because it’s your favorite. Understanding first what the different colors mean in business branding is the first thing to do.

Then, identify your brand’s identity to choose the right color palette for your business. Let’s discuss further.

1. Understand what the colors mean

Each color triggers a certain emotion in your audience. Sometimes it’s used to capture attention. Food chains such as KFC, Arby’s, McDonald’s, and Wendy’s use red to encourage appetite and urgency. For blue, it can evoke a feeling of trust. PayPal, CitiBank, and Chase understand this well. Click this link for more details on color psychology.

2. Identify your brand essence

The goals and personality of your brand should be the major basis of what color you should pick. So ask yourself this question: “How do you want your customers to feel when they’re interacting with your store?”, “Do you want them to feel relaxed, respected, or informed?”, or “How do you want your business to be viewed?”

Trivia: Starbucks uses the color green because they want their customers to feel that their shops are a relaxing place to be in. Green is a color that symbolizes nature and calmness.

3. Look at your competitor’s color palette

Picking the primary color for your business helps your brand stand out or be recognizable. But most of the time you could share the same brand essence with your competitors and pick the same primary color scheme. That’s why you study your competitors first before deciding on which color you should use.

Let’s take a look at the top food chains of America. McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC share the same primary color, right? They all use red to be exact. But because they want to stand out while keeping their primary color of choice, they add secondary and tertiary colors that are unique from one another. McDonald’s uses yellow, Burger King uses yellow and blue. KFC uses white and black.

4. Assess your marketing platforms

Red works very well for fast-food chains because no matter what the weather or background color is, it stands out from the light blue daytime sky or the dark blue nighttime sky. It is also used in department stores during a sale.

But red doesn’t work well on online marketing. It is too bright to look at up close using a device screen. The same goes for other colors. So when you choose your brand’s color palette, make sure it is pleasant to be seen no matter where it appears.

It doesn’t mean you should choose another color that doesn’t reflect your brand’s identity. You can still choose a lighter shade of whichever primary color you chose for your brand.

5. Define your target audience

If you want to sell goods or services based on customer identity, know who you’re selling to and consider a color that resonates with their age, gender orientation, or style. As we know, blue is a masculine color and pink is a feminine one. Older generations of customers like dark colors while younger ones like light shades.

Which color best fits your brand’s identity? Try to picture out how it would make your customers feel by seeing your color from their perspective. You can start by thinking like your customers. Once you’ve made a final decision, be consistent with your choice. It makes your brand even more memorable and relatable to when customers talk about your niche.