Your brand logo is the ultimate messenger of your company, no matter how big or small of an enterprise you are. When the best of your PR team won’t be there to speak on your company’s behalf, your logo will. When a customer is looking at your product side by side with the competition, and there’s no salesperson to boost you up, your logo will. It’s just baffling, and at the same time unfortunate how a lot of companies seem to overlook this aspect of branding, and still wonder why things are not panning out.
When for some undetermined reason you’re unable to reach your target market, take a step back and have a long look at your company’s logo and put yourself in the shoes of a stranger, a prospective client/customer. Does this logo make you feel happy, confident, trusting, or secure? Does it give off a relaxing, reassuring charm? More importantly, does it give you a clear picture of what the company stands for — stability, safety, freshness, reliability? The feelings you get by just looking at your logo should mirror the feelings you want to elicit from your market.
Interestingly, there are a couple of factors that make up the value and function of a logo. In this particular blog, we’ll tackle one of the biggest ones: color.
From a pre-verbal standpoint, colors apparently speak more than words can. Certain studies have in fact been made on how humans have an inborn response to specific colors. This simply translates to the weight colors bring on your logo. Whether you’re going elegantly black or feisty red, your customers are bound to have certain “automatic” feelings towards the color of your logo.
Red
The color red demands activity, action, and urgency. As a matter of fact, this color is even said to up breathing and heart rate! It’s also known to encourage appetite, hence its popularity among many food chain logos. If you wish to stimulate and direct attention, the color red could successfully attain results (case in point: SALE cards and signages).
Green
The color green brings relaxation, peace, trust, and hope. It is for this reason that many environmentally-conscious companies use this color to represent their cause and/or purpose. Common industries that use the color green are finance, technology, food, and household goods.
Blue
Blue inspires calmness, security, and a pleasant feeling commonly associated with the sea and sky — so it shouldn’t be such a shocker that majority of the top 100 companies globally use this color on their logo. Blue is popularly used in energy, finance, technology, and airline companies who seek to inspire trust, reliance, and confidence in their market. On the other hand, blue is rarely ever used in fashion and other industries whose primary goal is to get attention.
Orange
Doesn’t the color orange just remind you of sunshine, summer, and everything bright and happy? This color wheel neighbor of red and yellow share the same exciting, stimulating, and fun characteristics as the two. The color orange is popularly used in entertainment to evoke enthusiasm and excitement.
Yellow
Which color exudes energy better than the color yellow? None. Yellow also reminds us of the sun, hope, happiness, and excitement. If it’s a song, it would be an upbeat one that could tickle one into dancing, as it’s intended in branding to “catch the customer’s eye”.
Purple
The color purple exudes a luxurious, calming air that many industries take advantage of. This color is mostly used in beauty, finance, tech and healthcare. It can also be a symbol of royalty and power.
Black
Black is sleek and classy. No wonder why many high-end brands utilize this color in their logos, like Prada, Mercedes Benz, and BMW to name a few. It’s timeless and rarely ever gets old even after centuries.