15 things to consider about colour when rebranding your business
As your business evolves, a rebrand may become necessary to reflect your company's growth and change.
One of the crucial elements to consider during this process is colour. It's more than just a visual factor; it's a powerful communication tool that can evoke emotions, convey messages, and influence perceptions.
Sticking with Original Colours: The Case for Consistency
The decision to maintain original colours during a rebrand can be compelling for several reasons:
Brand Recognition: Colours are vital for brand identity. If your brand is already well-established with a certain colour scheme, retaining these colours can ensure consistency and maintain the familiarity that customers have with your brand.
Emotional Connection: Over time, customers develop an emotional connection with your brand's colors. Maintaining these colors can help preserve these connections.
However, there can be downsides:
Limited Evolution: Sticking with the same colors may limit the extent to which your brand can evolve and reinvent itself.
Outdated Colors: Sometimes, color trends change and the original colors may start to feel outdated or irrelevant.
Choosing New Colours: The Case for Reinvention
On the other hand, opting for new colours during a rebrand offers a fresh start:
Repositioning: New colours can signal a clear change in direction, market position, or audience.
Modernising: New colors can bring your brand up-to-date, aligning it with current trends and market expectations.
However, this choice isn't without risks:
Losing Brand Equity: Changing your brand colours may confuse customers, resulting in a potential loss of brand recognition.
Risk of Disconnect: If not done thoughtfully, new colours may alienate existing customers who identified with the old colour scheme.
The decision to stick with original colours or choose new ones during a rebrand isn't black and white. It depends on various factors, including your brand history, market position, target audience, and overall business strategy.
So what should you do?
As you can probably tell, there is no one answer fits all in this case. Which I can understand may not be the answer you are wanting to hear. The most important take away from this blog post is to ensure you have intentions. Like all factors of a rebrand you need objectives. If that objective is to pivot in the market place and attract new customers, then switching up your colour scheme is a great way to do that. However, if you are looking to cement yourself more or less with the same positioning for the same customers, a tweak to your current colours could be the way to go.
If you are considering a rebrand, I have outlined 15 aspects of colour you should consider before diving into hot pinks and lime greens.
1. Brand Recognition
Colour plays a significant role in making a brand instantly recognisable to its consumers. An impactful colour can help make a brand's identity stick in the minds of its audience. If you have a relatively simple business without much content or marketing - keep your colour simple (2 or 3), this will help people recognise your brand with limited visibility.
2. Emotional Connection
Different colours can evoke different emotions. The right colour can help a brand connect with its target audience on an emotional level, leading to stronger brand loyalty. There are books and books dedicated to colour theory. The first question to ask is how do you want people to feel when interacting with your brand? Safe, brave, excited, energetic? Whatever it is, there’s a colour for that.
3. Consistency
Consistent use of a particular colour across all mediums and platforms provides a unified brand experience. It helps create a cohesive look and feel, and reinforces brand identity.
As mentioned above, if you can keep it simple.
4. Differentiation
In a crowded market, a unique brand colour can help a company stand out from its competitors and position itself more effectively. Positioning becomes a huge factor here. How are you differentiating yourself from your competitors? Can your brand colour help solidify that difference?
5. Communicate Values
Colours can communicate the company's values and mission. For instance, green is often associated with environmental friendliness, while blue can symbolise trust and dependability.
6. Boosts Brand Recall
A unique and memorable colour can enhance brand recall. When customers see that colour, they're likely to think of your brand. So it is important to look around the room at your closest competitors and ensure you are not too similar. Otherwise you could put out $$ worth of campaigns only for your consumers to recall the wrong brand.
7. Psychological Impact
Different colours have different psychological impacts on viewers. For example, red can create urgency, while blue can be calming. Your brand strategy will help inform what impact you want your colour to have.
8. Improve Conversion Rates
If used strategically in calls-to-action, purchase buttons, and links, the right colour can boost conversions on a website or app. Have you ever watched a toddler get there hands on an iphone and magically make their way to the purchase page on a website or app? I have, my 2 year old kindly bought me a range of books on Amazon. This isn’t a mistake, it’s clever UX design using colour to improve conversions!
9. Highlight Brand Personality
Colour can be used to highlight the personality of the brand – be it vibrant, serious, luxurious, or youthful.
10. Global Relevance
Colours can have different meanings in different cultures. Choosing a colour that resonates well globally can help in creating a universally relatable brand. Particularly important if you have your eyes on export or overseas markets in the next 5-10 years.
11. Strategic Reinvention
A change of colour in rebranding can signify a strategic shift in the company’s direction, indicating a new vision or focus. When people see a big change like colour, they listen up. It feels like a big moment in a companies journey so use the impact to re educate your audience how great your company is!
12. Product Associations
Colours can enhance product association. For example, a brand that sells outdoor gear might choose earthy tones to associate its products with nature. In comparison, to be unique in the market you might use a bold bright colour to signify energy and adventure. Positioning is an important reference for all design decisions.
13. Encourage Desired Consumer Behaviour
Studies show that colours can impact consumer behaviour. For example, red encourages impulse buying, while blue promotes trust and security. There are even colours that sub consciously make you hungry. Think McDonalds, KFC and Burger King can you guess what the colour might be?
14. Reinforces Visual Elements
Color can reinforce or complement other visual brand elements like the logo, typography, and images.
15. Enhances Aesthetics
Lastly, the right choice of colour enhances the aesthetics of brand materials, from product packaging to website design, making them more appealing to the consumers.
Are you in the process of re branding and/or repositioning your business? I’d love to chat about how I can help.
Tom Lear is the Creative Director and founder of Society, a brand and marketing agency in Mount Maunganui. His ideas, thoughts and opinions come from over 12 years of design and art direction experience working with some of the world’s leading agencies including Allison Mitchell London, CHE Proximity, JWT and Saatchi & Saatchi Melbourne.
