Your brand’s colour palette can be one of the most important aspects of your branding. It can help shape your message, influence the mood of your target clients, and even improve bookings or affect your prices. In this guide, we’ll look at why your brand’s colour palette matters more than you think, how to choose the right colours, and what mistakes to avoid when choosing your own colours. You’ll be able to create beautiful designs while maintaining consistency with your brand message. Let’s get started!
Consumers subconsciously notice brand colours
Small businesses often have a limited marketing budget, and that can make awareness of your brand difficult to achieve. However, if you are working within a small budget, one of the best investments is in your brand’s colour palette. Research has shown that consumers subconsciously notice colours, and even react emotionally to certain hues; a good colour palette can be instrumental in boosting awareness of your brand and business or strengthening an emotional connection with your potential customers.
People remember colours more than they think
If a certain colour is prominent in your brand, it’s more likely to be remembered. This makes sense—colour evokes emotion and is a powerful visual cue, after all. As a small business, you want to grab your customers attention right away; remember that every element of your branding counts!
What’s the point of selecting a brand colour palette?
A good brand colour palette does two things: it represents your business and it can set you apart from competitors. And here’s where we run into a problem. Small businesses often make do with whatever colours they have on hand or start out with a pre-made template for their website. But don’t worry; fixing your colour palette is easier than you think. Within Savvy you can set your brand colours and then all your invoices, contracts, forms and websites can all reflect your brand and reinforce that visual cue to your clients.
Here is our brand colour palette for Savvy Vet Care for example:
brand colour palette for savvy vet care
There are specific considerations when selecting brand colours
Colours evoke different responses in people, even though we might not be able to put our finger on it. That’s why when developing a brand colour palette, it’s essential to take emotion into account. For example, black is a colour often used as it elicits sophistication or luxury because these emotions make consumers feel safe. But on its own, black makes some people feel uneasy. Colours can often affect how customers shop. Studies have shown that using red to attract shoppers works well for fashion items but not so much for other products like technology accessories. Blue, however, may encourage more spending because of its association with feelings of trust and security.
How do you select a brand color palette?
When choosing a colour palette for your brand, it’s important to keep in mind that colour has two elements: hue and saturation. Hue refers to a particular shade of a certain colour. Hues can be cool or warm, like blues and reds, respectively. The second part of colour is saturation, which refers to how pure or vivid a hue is—the higher its saturation value, the more vivid and intense its true colour is. This is why some colours look better together than others. For example, orange and blue make a bold statement when paired together because they are both very saturated colours with complementary hues. Contrastingly, orange and green are not as effective because they are both muted colours with opposing hues (orange-red vs. green-blue). So to create an effective colour palette for your brand, you need to know what hues work well together before selecting any actual colours.
colour wheel
Catch next weeks blog to look more at colours and branding and find out how the big brands do it!
Set your own branding in your Savvy by going to settings – branding. For help or to find out how Savvy can give your business and brand a professional persona, visit support.itsallsavvy.com for more information.
