Color Power: How Color Psychology Can Help Your Business
From logo design, workers’ productivity or your transaction with your customers, even a basic understanding of color psychology can help to your businesses’ advantage.
Basic Color Theory
Before going on to the psychology of colors, let’s understand how they work first.
Basically colors are made from the splitting white light. This spectrum goes from red from the left, to blue on the right. Each color has a variety of wavelength, making some colors easier to view than others.
Now, imagine the color wheel. There exist primary colors – red, yellow, and blue. Secondary colors lie between each gap, being the product of the mixture of two primary colors.
Complimentary colors are those residing on the opposite ends of the wheel. Red’s complimentary, for example, is green.
Supplementary colors on the other hand are those adjacent colors. Red’s supplementaries are either violets or browns and oranges.
Color theory can basically define warmness and coolness. Reds are warm, and going down the spectrum, blues are cool. From here, color psychology offers more explanations to how it can affect people’s perceptions and other expressive aspects.
What Colors Convey
Color greatly influences human emotion and behaviour. People often have a warm response to warmer colors, and vice versa for cool colors. But each color in the spectrum has a certain feeling that it can communicate.
RED is a powerful color and has a general feeling of love and affection, but may also mean fear, terror. As a very strong color with strong affinity for affections, reds are good colors to grab someone’s attention.
ORANGE delves between the powers of red’s emotions with yellow’s joyful atmosphere. It exudes a generally positive attitude and enthusiasm. The color entails a comforting feeling and creating a fun aura.
YELLOW is perceived to be the happiest color. It exudes joy, optimism, cheerfulness. It is the main reason of the success of the smiley icon. It has a particularly long wavelength, which makes it one of the easiest color to see as well as making it one powerful color with psychological meanings.
GREEN usually resides in aspects of nature, a color exuding balance and harmony. Its affinity to natural life makes it one of the most-seen color. However, it can be used to portray over-possession nad materialism.
BLUE is the most-liked color according to numerous studies. It conveys feelings of reliability, responsibility, trust and dependability. Unlike red which allows for physical reaction, blue tends to lend a more mental rection, making it a color suitable for destressing needs.
VIOLET, exuding a royal aura, conveys luxury mystery and magic. Being the mix of red and blue, it balances the physical and spiritual. While the color is mysterious, it allows for growth of new ideas, making it the color of creativity.
Even BLACK and WHITE has emotions attached to them. Black is sophisticated, serious, controlled and independent, while white is purity and completeness. While black can show evil, depression, or even death, white gives out new beginnings, a refreshing state for new ideas to flourish.
Find the color palette which suits your general mood and strategies from these sets of emotions and feelings colors convey.
Marketing With Colors
It is now clear that people’s perceptions can be triggered by colors. But there are some other aspects that must be realized when choosing colors for specific goals and purposes.
Color perceptions have a broader messaging pattern. A study, for example, shows a vast majority making snappy judgments for a product on color basis alone. Still another study reveals perceived appropriateness for a color to be used – to fit – for a particular brand.
Still other studies show that general perceptions over colors do not necessarily reflect on some brand. Greens might entail a calm demeanor, but is also used for other branding themes that do not necessarily look calm, like financial spaces (Mint) or even energy drinks (Monster).
From here, it’s the brand that matters to create the mood, feeling, and image, and no clear-cut color schemes would be dependent on these.
Gender might even play a crucial role. A study revealed that blue rises as a major preferred color for both men and women. This might explain why Facebook chose and still uses a generally blue theme.
Color coordination might also lead to a certain action. A simple change in color pattern might lead people to do a button click, for example. A predominantly green themed website will look calmly ok, but if a designer would wish visitors to click, a red button will be more effective, red being a direct contrast to green and helps highlight the button.
We now see that color has the power to influence your target audience. But also know too its limitations, as well as its arbitrariness. These are just some of the applications of the power color can bring. Armed with more research, you can come up with your own palette to suit your business.
This article is written by radix4ever. Order an article from him here.
