10 Tips to Build a Brand: Color Choice

Small businesses rarely have the marketing and creative resources to provide appropriate brand building or brand management to ensure their brand maintains consistency and strength as business grows. While it’s always good to have a trained marketing eye to guide you along the way, this list of 10 quick tips will help provide added support for your brand building and management — just a few small items entrepreneurs and small businesses can do to get a jump above other small brands with big ideas.

Originally, I intended to post all of these tips together in a single post, however each tip is a different topic in itself, so I’ve opted to separate them out. As each new item is released, I’ll include links to previously posted tips to make things easy. Enjoy.

Tip #1: Pick colors that mean something. The colors you choose in your pallete to represent your buisness subconsciously say something about what you are trying to convey and can provide a constant message to your customers. There are many different resources out there that depict the meaning of color in design like this one, or this one. Cameron Chapman of Smashing Magazine provides a very detailed description of the meaning of colors in design with some great examples and other resources. Here’s a list of some basic colors, the meaning behind each and the emotions they elicit in people.

Now do you understand why restaurants often use red as a main color in their pallet , banks are typically blue or green and the inside of planes are normally blue? When colors pass through sensory receivers in the process of converting what your eye views to what your brain receives as an image, they produce emotions and feelings. Don’t simply choose your favorite colors. Choose colors that will mean something to your audience, not yourself.