HOW TO USE COLOURS IN MARKETING AND PROMOTION P12

How to use colours in marketing and promotion

Your brain uses colours to recognize traits about products and the brands that produce them. That’s why a shade of chartreuse that would feel appropriate for a PC is puke-inducing for a cupcake. In a nutshell, this is colour psychology at work. Here’s a complete guide on how to use colours in marketing and promotion. The associations our brains make with certain colours are key to bridging the gap between marketing materials and their target customers. When you look closely at commonly used colours in promotions for your industry, you’ll see many of the same ones popping up again and again. It’s not a coincidence, and they’re not just your competitors’ favourite colours! These are the colours that (research shows) audiences tend to connect with their needs and expectations from brands in your industry. Choosing which colours are the ideal palette for your marketing and promotion efforts is part aesthetic, part testing and part science—much more a part than you probably realize. The science of colour marketing is what we’re going to explore today to help you communicate your messages most effectively.

Why colours matter in marketing and advertising

Colours speak a language words just can’t replicate. That is, they communicate with us on an emotional level and are thus more effective at persuasion. A product’s color can convince us that it tastes fresher than the same product with a different colour. It can even make medication (and placebos!) feel more effective. Drug manufacturers lean on color associations to make sleeping pills blue and stimulants yellow and red because these are the colors consumers associate with their respective effects. Although this might sound like magic, there’s data to support it. 85 percent of consumers cite color as the primary reason for choosing which products to buy. Additionally, up to 90 percent of impulse decisions about products are based solely on the products’ colors. According to color psychology researchers, 42 percent of consumers form their opinions of packaging based on the mono carton, corrugated boxes, rigid boxes’ designs, with color contributing more to their opinions than any other factor. And 52 percent of the time, poor color choice and other inferior design choices send users off a packaging, never to return.

How colors communicate with customers

Its one thing to know that colors are important in marketing and promotion, but the real challenge lies in harnessing color psychology to speak to your customers. You probably already know the basics of colour psychology, like red = passion and white = cleanliness, but that’s only the beginning of all the complex ways color can influence how a buyer thinks and feels about a product. For example, researchers have noted links between specific colors and behaviors, like red, royal blue, black and orange connecting easily with impulse buyers. For bargain hunters, the colors of choice are teal and navy blue. Some of these less obvious color associations make a lot of sense, like pink, sky blue and other soft colours connecting with traditionally minded clothing shoppers. Similarly, brown’s not a great choice for produce packaging because it makes us think of overripe, rotting fruits and veggies. Colour psychology isn’t just about evoking certain emotions. It’s about using colours to meet consumers’ expectations for products and brands. Consider colours that are bad fits for certain products or types of services, like a bright yellow and

orange logo for a bank or a brown or gray box for feminine hygiene products. These colours feel wrong to us because they don’t match our expectations. At the end of the day, our expectations are largely rooted in biological programming. Red is a popular color for food brands because bright red fruits are ripe and ready to eat, as is freshly cut meat. Nature taught us what certain colors mean, and in design, it is best to use colors according to nature’s rules. People make purchasing decisions based on what they expect from the colors they see and whether they feel the colors are doing what they are supposed to do. The ways colors influence our perceptions of the world aren’t always obvious, nor are they always logical. Our associations with a color can even vary depending on our cultural backgrounds, our personal backgrounds and our individual tastes. But there are generalizations we can make based on the science of color psychology. Combine this with target audience research to get deeper insight into what your unique consumers prefer.

How color meanings vary by culture

Anytime you’re choosing a color scheme, always take into account your target audience’s cultural background. Many colours have specific associations in some cultures that are different in others. Sometimes, even the same country can have regional-specific colour associations. Take just one color—yellow, for example. In India, the color yellow is associated with courage, pureness and traditionally part of in Indian community whereas in parts of the American south it can be slang for cowardice. In many Latin American cultures, it’s the color of mourning and death. In China, yellow can have vulgar connotations. In Germany, you go yellow—not green—with envy. Head over to the Middle East and you’ll find yellow is imperial and sacred (not purple, which is associated with royalty in European cultures) often worn by members of the ruling or royal classes.

Whenever you design marketing and promotional materials for your brand, researching your target audiences’ cultural associations with each color is an important part of your due diligence. Using a color scheme that doesn’t fit with your audience’s expectations for your brand can doom it before it reaches the market.

The best colors for your call to action

Red is the best color for a call to action because it’s all about action and doing things NOW, right? Not necessarily. Although red can be a great color to use for your call to action (CTA) and it certainly is used successfully by many companies, it’s not your only color choice for a CTA button—nor is it always your best choice. Context is important to buying decisions, and sometimes the optimal option color depends on the overall design and the specific brand and product. The right call to action color for your brand matches the state of mind your customers need to be in to make a purchase.

Colours amplify your marketing message

Hopefully, you now have a better sense of how the psychology of colour works in marketing and promotion. The more you work with colour in mind, the easier it will become to convey your unique branding message to your customer. Using colour strategically is more than just choosing what looks good to you. After all, there are people walking around out there today who think olive green and fuchsia are a match made in heaven—and for some businesses, maybe they are!

UNDERSTANDING CONCEPTS AND COLOUR TERMINOLOGY

Colour theory is a science and art unto itself, which some build entire careers on, as packaging design consultants or sometimes brand consultants. Knowing the effects colour has on a majority of people is an incredibly valuable expertise that designers can master and offer to their clients. If you’re going to use colour effectively in your designs, you’ll need to know a few colour concepts, as well as colour theory terminology.

HUE

Hue is the most basic of colour terms and denotes an object’s colour. When we say “blue,” “green,” or “red,” we’re talking about hue. The hues you use in your designs convey important messages to your customers [especially, who loved more on designed carton packaging concept] In colour theory, Hue is one of the main properties (called colour appearance parameters) of a colour, defined technically in the CIECAM02 model as "the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet," which in certain theories of colour vision are called unique hues. This term describes the distinct characteristic of colour that distinguishes red from yellow from blue. These hues are largely dependent on the dominant wavelength of light that is emitted or reflected from an object. For instance, the range of visible light is generally between Infrared Light (~700nm wavelength) and Ultraviolet Light (~400nm wavelength). In the diagram to the