A Quick Guide To Using Color in Your Branding and Marketing
Learning the Basics of Color Theory for Business Owners and Marketers
"Yellow in branding means this." "Blue means this." Using color effectively in your branding and marketing is more complex than selecting a color based on generalities. There's a lot more to a company’s brand colors than the six base colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Many branding and design professionals make sweeping claims about the effects that basic colors have on consumers' mood and experience. This just isn't true. The reality is that color in branding and marketing is deeply nuanced, and its effects range significantly based value and saturation. 🎨
Basic Color Theory for Professionals
So before you dive headfirst into a company brand launch or logo refresh, let's learn about basic color theory. There's way more to brand and marketing color psychology than you might think, and important to understand how different types of color, like value, hue, and shade, affect human psychology. For example, how dark a color is, or how muted it is can greatly affect the mood of your brand or marketing content. Moods can range from bright and energetic to moody and sophisticated, just by adjusting how dark your colors are.
What is a Color Wheel?
Anyone who creates content for their company, be it a solopreneur or a marketing manager, should have a basic understanding of the color wheel.
A color wheel is organized by your primary colors, which are: red, yellow, and blue.
Next are your secondary colors, which are: orange, green, and purple.
These six colors are the basic colors people think of when they name colors. But there are also intermediate colors, like red-orange (coral), blue-green (teal), etc. In total, 12 colors are represented on the color wheel.
Within these 12 colors are parts called hues, tints, tones, and shades. Color can often be generalized or “lumped together” by non-designers, so it’s important to educate yourself on how these four color components affect your brand, marketing and creative content.
Hue is what’s considered the color in its pure form. It’s what you squeeze out of the paint tube.
Tint is adding white to your color, to make it lighter. This often creates a pastel effect.
Tone is adding grey, or white and black, to your color, making it less bright. Ever heard the phrase “tone it down?” Think of tone as making your creative content more muted and calm.
Shade is adding black, which will make your color darker. It still will retain its bold look, but will have a totally different impression on your customer. Think sophisticated, moody, refined.
How Color Tint, Tone, and Shade Affect How Customers Feel When They See Your Company’s Brand
One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make is when they forget to consider how color tint, tone, and shade affect how customers perceive their brand. Saying you want a “yellow” brand means very little, as one color can create a wildly different brand experience based on the tint, tone, and shade of the yellow you want to use.
Do you want your yellow brand to be energetic or grounded? Serious or playful? Contemporary or retro? All of these brand descriptors can be crafted based on tint, tone, and shade.
Let’s take a look at three different brands that use yellow in their logos. You’ll quickly see the different moods that yellow creates for a company’s brand and realized it’s impossible to categorize colors based on six main types alone.
John Deere uses an ultra-saturated yellow hue in their visual branding and content. It’s electrifying and bold. It represents energy and movement.
Now, let’s examine Caterpillar’s brand colors, which is in the same industry as John Deere: heavy equipment. They both use yellow in their branding, but look at how different the yellow appears. Can you guess what color value Caterpillar has used in their yellow? If you guessed tone, you are right. They added both white and black (grey) to their brand color, creating a yellow that is more subtle.
Color Theory Example: Comparing Credit Union Logo Colors
Now that we have a basic understanding of how color tone, tint, and shade affect how customers feel about a company’s brand, let’s look at several other examples within the credit union industry. There are over 4,500 credit unions in the United States, each with their own unique visual brand, like their logo and website, as well as customers and values. By exploring several credit unions that use red as their main brand color, we can see the difference even subtle color changes make in how we feel about their brands.
First let’s review basic color theory.
Hue is the color in its pure form, as seen on the left of this helpful chart.
Tint is adding white to your color, to make it lighter. In this case, the more tint you add to red, the more pink it will become.
Tone is adding grey, or white and black, to your color, making it less bright. Red becomes more of a mauve and taupe color the more grey you add.
Shade is adding black, which will make your color darker. Red becomes maroon, then burgundy, when shaded.
Alabama Credit Union’s logo color leans more maroon, using a shade of red that makes the color darker. The shade of red creates a distinguished, almost royal feel to the brand. You can see that the red, although darker, is still saturated and vibrant.
Red Rocks Credit Union’s logo is more muted, creating a retro, southwestern feel indicative of its location in Denver, Colorado. A tone has been added to this red, softening it’s vibrance and giving it a mellow effect.
Harvard Credit Union’s logo uses a tint of red, creating a soft, welcoming coral color.
The Impact Brand Colors Have on Human Psychology and Buying Decisions
Reviewing these three credit union logos side by side demonstrates how different tints, tones, and shades of a certain color can make a customer feel. Human connection to color is extremely powerful and often subliminal; we as customers may not even realize we are being swayed by color in our choice. Much of our reaction to color dates back thousands of years, yes, but modern life has also shaped our response to colors used in company branding.
In early 2024, we conducted a study using three different versions of a generic logo, one pink, one tan, and one blue.
In this experiment, we asked participants three questions:
Which company would you do business with just because of the logo color alone?
Which company would you do business with if this company was an accounting firm?
Which company would you do business with if this company was a fitness app?
The goal was to understand how color alone affects buyer preferences in general, and also how buyer preferences change based on industry. The results showed that certain colors resonate with buyers dependent on the industry.
We firstly hypothesized that the more common corporate colors, like blue and tan, would win for the accounting firm, and we were correct. These colors represent stability and blue is used often in finance. For the fitness app, we also guessed correctly that the bright magenta would win. It’s a dynamic, energetic color that is associated with both exercise and technology (think Lyft, T-Mobile, Airbnb). You can see how subliminal color preference can significantly affect customers’ decision-making from this small sample alone.
Conclusion
Now that you have a basic understanding of color theory, you’ll be able to make more informed, nuanced decisions about which colors best represents your company’s brand. We hope that you’ll notice the different brand colors that exist in your industry and beyond, and how they make you feel.
Video: Busting Common Myths on Brand Colors and Color Theory
For more information, watch 38th & Kip Owner Alicia Disantis’ video on color theory for professionals.
In the wise words of Patrick Swayze's Johnny, "Nobody puts color in a corner." Or was it baby...
