Colors play an instrumental role in startup marketing success. To understand their impact, you must first acknowledge that startup marketing is an altogether different beast than traditional marketing.
Most startups work with very little cash and fewer resources. So, every marketing gamble they make and every strategy they put in place must pay off. Unlike traditional marketing where long-term strategies are common and goals are expected to deliver in 5-10 years, startup marketing is a daily battle.
In these do-or-die situations, colors emerge as high-value efficient tools that can flip opinions, strengthen narratives, and heighten brand recognition.
How do colors do all that? What powers do they hold?
In this post, we explore the emotional and psychological pull colors exert on human feelings and behavior. We use this information to create striking color palettes that deliver specific marketing goals.
The Color Psychology: The Psychological Pull of Colors
Have you ever wondered why we sometimes name our feelings with certain colors? Seeing red, turning white with fear, and feeling blue are common ways to express emotions vividly.
Color psychology studies the relationship between colors and emotions. It investigates what emotions people associate with colors, why, and how far these associations go. It also explores the factors that drive these associations.
As we’ll soon see, some color associations are personal and highly subjective while others are more broad-ranging and in many cases universal, regardless of whether individual or universal, color associations can be extremely powerful. They drive about 62-90% of product assessments and can affect how people perceive your products, brands, and digital experiences.
Therefore, getting them right is crucial. But how do you go about that? How do you make sure that you’ve chosen colors that strike the right emotional cord with your audiences?
The Role of Colors in Startup Marketing
Colors play several different roles in marketing. The right color palette can increase brand recognition, improve brand perception, and aid brand recall.
1. How do colors evoke emotions and perceptions?
Colors employ all three types of associations when added to the marketing mix.
Personal: White, as a clean and pure color, will bring this emotional understanding to the table.
Cultural: White’s cultural association with certain emotional characteristics will further inform the decision-making process.
Universal: How do people on the whole respond to white? Are those associations positive or negative?
When these color associations match your brand’s core character, you’ve hit gold. You can then use these color meanings to create a wellness logo, a wedding monogram, a hospital website, etc. with more knowledge and wisdom, and better chances of success.
2. How to choose the right colors to resonate with the target audience?
While a general understanding of color associations is a good starting point, zeroing in on colors that make your target audience move requires more work. Try a few strategies to understand what your customers expect.
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Research your audience: Take feedback from your customers through a poll or survey and ask them about colors they typically associate with the types of emotions you’re trying to elicit from them.
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Research your industry and competition: People associate certain colors with certain industries and products. Premium products usually come in exclusive colors like purple or gold. So, if your product is in orange or peach, it may be perceived as belonging to a lower price tier.
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Study the color wheel: The color wheel divides colors into warm and cool temperatures. Warm colors like orange, red, and yellow represent cheerful, young, and happy brand associations. Cooler colors are used to signify sophistication, trust, and innovation.
Hopefully, these exercises will give you a clearer picture of what you are working with. Fine-tune your color selections by creating a mood board and see how your brand will look when decked in those colors.
3. How do color palettes contribute to brand recognition and recall?
In addition to assigning specific positive emotions to your brand, colors also have more practical roles to play in brand marketing.
For example, some colors are more noticeable than others. Bright and bold shades command more attention as they are easy to spot from a distance. If your brand logo is in hot pink or bright purple, it has a better chance of generating recall than a muted color palette of lavender and grey.
Contrasting colors are also helpful in brand recognition and recall. Colors on the opposite ends of the color wheel contrast well with each other and become more noticeable. Colors that sit next to each other can also work but do not have the same force to them.
When designing your brand’s color palette, pay attention to how the colors might look on different marketing mediums. Website, product packaging, brand merchandise, and office stationery, among others. Colors that translate well from print to digital and vice versa are the best to bank on.
How To Design A Color Palette For Your Marketing Collateral?
Once you’ve done your homework on the theory of color palette design, it’s time to get some practical work in. Color wheel is going to be a lot of help there. Additionally, you can use automatic color palette generators by filtering through themes, primary colors, or color moods.
If you want a more organic approach, here are 5 steps to guide you.
1. Choose a base color
This is the color that you know you want to work with. Ideally, you have arrived at this color after a long and arduous exercise of sifting through color psychology, researching your target market, understanding your brand personality, studying your industry norms, and so on.
The idea behind this labor is to make sure that when you choose a color, it's a color that you see as the main color of your brand. The rest of your palette will be built on this one single color. So, choose carefully.
2. Pick a color theme around your base color
There are 6 main color themes to choose from. ‘Theme’ refers to the emotional and psychological effect you’re hoping to create with the color palette. The themes start from the most harmonious and gradually go over to the most brash and bold.
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Monochromatic: It’s the safest, most cohesive color theme using various tones, tints, and shades of the same pure color.
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Analogous: It’s created by using two colors that sit on either side of the main color. These color schemes are a step ahead of monochromatic and give more variety to the palette. The effect is calm yet interesting.
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Complementary: We step into contrasting colors with complementary color themes. This scheme is achieved by pairing the main color with the color that sits right opposite it on the wheel.
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Split complementary: This color theme introduces contrasts less strikingly. Create this theme by choosing a color plus two on either side of its complementary color.
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Triadic: Triadic themes are created with three colors that are equidistant on the wheel. They form a perfect triangle and create a vibrant color palette.
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Tetradic: Also known as double-complementary, they use four colors in the scheme and form two sets of complementary colors.
Create your color palette with at least 5 colors in the theme for the most balance and variety.
3. Add in some neutrals for stability and foundation
Neutral colors include black, white, grey, brown, beige, and tan, etc. These colors lack intensity and support the main colors in the palette to appear more solid and prominent. Neutral colors are also easy on the eyes and are often used to increase text readability and accessibility.
Neutral colors give your palette the perfect background as your visuals go from one marketing place to another. You can use neutral colors in the palette to serve a secondary or even accent role, depending on the environment.
4. Identify your primary, secondary, and accent colors
Speaking of secondary and accent colors, it’s important to understand how they all differ.
Your primary color is the main color of your palette. Your logo design, website, important CTAs, product labels, and other high-stake marketing collateral will feature this color prominently. Think of the Starbucks Green or Coca-Cola red.
Secondary colors play a supporting role. Their job is more functional as in
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Making the primary color stand out in crowded visuals by giving it a protective buffer or border,
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Highlighting the brand message more effectively by introducing a different color mood, and
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Creating visual flair and aesthetic appeal by employing different color environments.
Accent colors are there to attract the eye. They are used in small quantities in the color scheme. Think of them as guest stars in a popular show. They don’t appear often, but when they do, they instantly up the ante and draw attention.
A well-organized color palette uses all colors in the scheme with purpose and vigor. Instead of putting the whole weight of branding and marketing on a single color or a pair, the entire palette is utilized for greater brand recognition and recall.
5. Select a color mood
What’s going to be your color mood? More importantly, what on earth is a color a mood?
The color mood refers to the overall feel or energy you perceive when you view the palette. Does it seem bright, muted, colorful, or dark? Color mood sets the final tone of your color palette.
You can achieve the desired color palette mood by adjusting the palette’s overall hue, saturation, and light. For a dark mood, increase the saturation. For a brighter palette, increase the hue and lightness, and for muted shades, dim the lights.
A quick tip: Save your existing palette before you begin to set the mood. This stage is going to be a bit of trial and error. In case you go too far in the wrong direction, saving the palette ensures you have the palette ready to start over.
6. Use the latest color tools and advanced technologies
While it’s fun to create a new color palette from scratch, it can be a lot of work for non-designers. Especially when you’re in a startup environment with already limited resources. Why not utilize the tons of AI tools available and maximize what you’ve got?
Coolors is an automatic color palette generator that can slash all this time-consuming work in half. Not only does it give you a massive range of color palettes to choose from but advanced features too. For example, picking a color palette from a picture you upload, visualizing how your chosen palette will look on various marketing materials, and adjusting the color palette for brightness and accessibility.
Color Hunt is also a popular tool but here you have premade schemes to choose from. This is ideal for startup owners who are looking for a quick palette generator and do not have a lot of time for creative experimentation. Color Hunt offers collections of color schemes in popular styles such as pastel, vintage, neon, gold, and similar. It makes it easy to keep the process straightforward and get to your desired color schemes quickly.
Universal Color Associations
Color associations can be of three kinds:
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Personal: These are emotional associations to colors based purely on personal preferences and experiences. If your favorite color is teal, you might respond more favorably to products and designs in that color.
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Cultural: A lot of color associations are informed by the culture and society we grow up in. Western audiences consider the white color a symbol of marital celebration, but many Eastern countries equate it with death and mourning.
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Universal: Universal color associations are color-emotion relationships that transcend personal preferences, experiences, and cultural backgrounds. Blue is a universally accepted color representing vastness and stability.
Helsinki University set out a study in 2020 to examine the extent to which color associations are universal. They discovered the similarity coefficient to be 0.88. In other words, there was 88% universality when people made color-emotion connections. Red was love no matter the location or language, and brown was rotting whether you were in Timbuktu or Taiwan.
Below is a table to understand the color-emotion similarities even further:
| Color | Emotion | Universal Similarity |
|---|---|---|
| Black | Sadness | 53% |
| Blue | Contentment and Relief | 33% |
| Brown | Disgust | 33% |
| Grey | Sadness | 45% |
| Orange | Joy | 40% |
| Pink | Love | 47% |
| Purple | Pleasure | 24% |
| Red | Love | 66% |
| Turquoise | Pleasure | 34% |
| White | Relief | 42% |
| Yellow | Joy | 47% |
Wrapping Up
With so many colors to choose from, pick those that offer the most harmony between your brand’s true soul and the soul of the colors themselves. The more congruence there is, the more authentic and credible your marketing will be.
Startup marketing also benefits from bold color choices that break through the doom scrolling of social media. Even if your color scheme is powder pink and shy pastels, use them with flair, confidence, and panache with bold graphics and illustrative visuals for maximum impact.
