What colour is your marketing?

Theories abound about which colours and combinations of colours evoke which emotions and which shades should be used to sell what.  Then there are the cultural differences to add another layer of uncertainty – yellow has  ‘royal’ connotations in several Far Eastern countries and green hats in China may indicate a man’s wife is cheating on him – apparently! And if you really want to complicated about colours have a look at this attack on Schiphol Airport’s new logo.

Look out for Mardi Grape - a sophisticated crossover between purple, brown and grey

There is some agreement on the basic emotional responses elicited by the most popular colours, but these are pretty general and in some cases blindingly obvious. For example:

Blue: serene and perceived as trustworthy, dependable, fiscally responsible and secure.
Green: suggests health, freshness and serenity. Deeper greens are associated with wealth or prestige, while light greens are calming.
Black: serious, bold, powerful and classic. It creates drama and suggests sophistication.

You can see the full list here but don’t expect too many surprises. For a similar explanation with some nice examples have a look at www.1stwebdesigner.com

Before we start dissecting the colour wheel one more time, perhaps it would be a more useful to ask a few simple questions when trying to pin down that prefect color combination.

1. Do the colours support your brand attributes?

2. Are the colours relevant to your target audience?

3. Do you have existing colours you want to keep or do we need a fresh start?

4. Will the colours reproduce well across various media (including web safe colours)?

5. Are the colours different or distinguishable from your competitors’ colours?

6. Is there a wide enough palette of colours for different applications, the introduction of a secondary colour palette is popular?

7. Do the colours work in all parts of the world where you plan to do business?

8. Do you want to take account or emerging colour trends?

The last one is particularly difficult. The industry experts that constitute the Colour Marketing Group try to define forthcoming colour trends up to 18 months in advance: their hot tip for 2010 is Mardi Grape which they describe as “a sophisticated crossover between purple, brown and grey”. The also suggest that the following colours are also worth keeping an eye on this year:

Red: possibly strong with pink intuition; bright and clean with energy and excitement – a clean pop to go with neutrals.
Yellow: greener, more natural yellows, softened with grey.
Green: optimistic and uplifting, a clear and bright accent green with a slight shift toward blue.
Blue: a saturated blue with grey influences; rich without being too luxe.
Beige-Brown: a true chameleon to complement darker hues, it can be either matte or metallic.
Neutral Grey: grey with a touch of purple, drawing inspiration from mineral, concrete and steel.

The web provides exceptional opportunities for people to compare, contrast, mix, blend and generally play around with colours in real time. Here are a few of our favourite web pages and widgets that allow you to play with colour.

www.kuler.adobe.comOver 12,000 different colour combinations to choose from.

www.webdevelopersnotes.com200 tri-colour combinations here.

www.colourlovers.comMy favourite, colours, patterns, palettes and information galore.

www.colorcombos.comLots of colour combos and some interesting articles.

www.colorsontheweb.comThe colour tools are useful but the Google ads are a bit annoying.

www.colorschemedesigner.comNice and easy to use.

www.colorhunter.com Upload an image and the ‘Colour Hunter’ will create a palette of complimentary colours with hexadecimal references.

www.degraeve.com/color-palette Similar to colourhunter except with out the upload facility. You need to key in or paste in the url of the image from which you want to create the palette.

Finally a useful list of on-line colour tools and resources can be found at: http://www.avivadirectory.com/color

One Response to “What colour is your marketing?”

1. Liz Talbot says:

   June 16, 2010 at 9:43 am

   Interesting article. Cant wait to see more of ‘Mardi Grape’! Much better name than ‘Pavement Sludge’ which sprung to my mind with the description!