Which color evokes trust

During John's 25 years in advertising, he's created brand standards for Fortune companies like Mitsubishi and won numerous awards for his design work. Justine Beauregard. Saikiran Chandha. Ytzia Belausteguigoitia. Mark Vickery. Eric Hanson. Skip to content Profile Avatar. Subscribe to Entrepreneur. Magazine Subscriptions. Your Brand's True Colors Learn what the colors you use say about your business. By John Williams March 7, Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

More About Marketing. Growth Strategies. Justine Beauregard Nov 11, Prepare to Succeed. Saikiran Chandha Nov 11, Ytzia Belausteguigoitia Nov 11, Latest on Entrepreneur. This is why understanding color psychology can be so useful for your marketing efforts. Because it can help you portray your brand the way you want to. While choosing the right colors can enhance your brand perception, poor color selection can do damage to your brand image. For instance, if you choose the wrong colors for your content or logo, it can turn out to be less readable, and hard for your audience to understand.

Or you can risk being ignored all together. Color can be used by marketers to influence how people think and behave toward a brand, and how they interpret any information.

The choice of colors can help people decide what is important. Marketing colors like red can capture attention. The red color meaning is associated with excitement, passion, danger, energy, and action. In color psychology, red is the most intense color. And thus, can provoke the strongest emotions. Red can also trigger danger so you want to use the color sparingly.

Red is the iconic color used for brands like Coca Cola and YouTube. The color red tends to encourage appetite hence why brands like Coca Cola use it often in their branding. They also use words like happiness in their branding so they use the color red to build excitement. YouTube likely uses the color red due to the excitement of watching videos online. Notice how the red part of their logo is the play button which can help compel someone into action.

It encourages you to want to press play on their videos. In color psychology, orange represents creativity, adventure, enthusiasm, success, and balance. Many marketers still use the color for call to actions or areas of a website that they want to draw the eye too. The Home Depot sells products that you can use for your home. The orange logo here also represents creativity. In color psychology, the color meaning for yellow revolves around sunshine. It evokes feelings of happiness, positivity, optimism, and summer but also of deceit and warning.

Some brands choose to use a cheerful yellow color as the background or border for their website design. A little touch of yellow can help your website visitors associate your store with something positive. The color yellow is used by brands such as Ferrari and Ikea.

Many people dream of driving a Ferrari. The luxury brand is associated with this feeling of happiness, summer and a carefree lifestyle. The Ikea brand also uses the color yellowing in their branding. What does buying furniture have to do with happiness? This milestone is usually filled with happiness and optimism for the new change making yellow a great color to associate with the brand. Pink is a popular color for brands that primarily serve a female audience.

Whereas other brands highlight the pink color in their logo, website design, or to highlight key messages. On their website they use a combination of pink and black to highlight key marketing details. On top of the obvious associations with colour there is a much deeper cognitive element to colour that goes much further than simple recognition and emotion. Our own agency, We Can Creative , uses the colour yellow to maximum effect.

Secondly yellow resonates with the left, more logical, side of the brain. Because of this, yellow is known to inspire original thought and inquisitiveness. Our emotional connection with colour is strong and has evolved over millions of years. Nature kicks our ass when it comes to colour palettes; life is diverse and rich in colour.

Look again; a puddle can be a myriad of colour while everywhere else is awash with blues, silvers, greens and all sorts of oyster colours.

Graham Watson is the co-founder of We Can Creative. Sign up to become a member of the Guardian Small Business Network here for more advice, insight and best practice direct to your inbox. Blue for trust, red for passion: how to pick a colour scheme for your brand. Men also see green things as more yellow than women.

Women are less sensitive to color in the detail of objects and also in things which are moving quickly. Red has been associated with romance and an American experiment offering dates with identical pictures of the same woman in different colored dresses found that a red dress was most effective in stimulating male desire. Remember that color can be culturally dependent. For example, although Black is the color of death in many countries, in China the color associated with death is White.

So use the color in situations where you are trying to persuade. Use shades of brown and green to relax people and say you are environmentally friendly. Use red to kick people into action. And so on. Remember also that meaning is what we create. It does not exist in the color itself and individual meanings may or may not exist in different cultures and individuals.