Colour is one of the many things that makes our world so beautiful. It creates variety in what we see and allows us to quickly recognize things that are different. Not only can we create rapid recognition through colour, colours also produce emotion and feelings. These feelings help us associate meaning to the thing that we are looking at. In Western culture each colour has several emotions that can be generated. This is why choosing the right colour for your marketing is important. If you choose the wrong colour, you can create an emotion that doesn’t fit with your company’s values.
The Emotions of Colour
Here are some of the common colours and the emotions and meaning that they create:
Red: Passion, Anger, Vigor, Love, Danger
Yellow: Knowledge, Energy, Joy, Intellect, Youth
Green: Fertility, Wealth, Healing, Success, Growth
White: Purity, Healing, Perfection, Clean, Virtue
Blue: Knowledge, Trust, Tranquility, Calm, Peace, Cool
Black: Fear, Secrecy, Formal, Luxury
Purple: Royalty, Wisdom, Spirituality, Imagination
Gray: Balance, Sophistication, Neutrality, Uncommitted
Orange: Creativity, Invigoration, Unique, Stimulation
The colour orange is frequently used to stand out amongst the crowd. It it great on websites for buy now buttons and other messages that you want to stand out. While some people think that our brand of becoming an orange came about because both myself and my brother are redheads, we chose the colour because it represents who we are and the values of our company. We want people when thinking about us to think about our uniqueness and creativity. These are the things that our clients are typically looking for in a marketing company. The colour helps us align their emotion with the brand of who we are.
Do the emotions that your colours create represent who you are? If they don’t you could be confusing your customer.
Colour is just one of the tools you can use to become an orange by aligning your brand with the emotions you want to create. I look forward to sharing more tools in future posts.
