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Colour Blind or Colour Aware?
Did you ever think about the fact that you are confronted with colours every moment of every day? Whether you are simply walking across the street, watching TV or working at the office, colours are everywhere. Everybody is influenced by colour and makes unconscious associations with certain shades.
Research by Kissmetrics that was conducted in a group of 900 people indicated that 85 percent of the audience thinks colour is an important factor when making a purchase. Choosing the right colour can lead to 80 percent more brand recognition. Statements made in colour are being read better and the transfer of information is 55 to 78 percent faster. The overall obvious conclusion of their research is that colour plays a big role when it comes to the buying behaviour of consumers.
Naturally, we wonder why colour has influence on the consumer’s behaviour. Colours invoke all kinds of emotions and feelings. The psychological meaning of colours is largely universally determined. For example, people become more active when they are prompted with the colour red. Red is also seen as a sales colour, which is why often the big displays in ships during sale are coloured red. It’s a colour that stands out and catches the consumers attention.
Erno Hannink of Color Com conducted over 30.000 inquiries with regards to the significance of colour. The results show that blue is by far the most favourite colour. Blue stands for reliability, sincerity, communication, effectivity and loyalty. An example of the incorporation of the colour blue is the Vicson website. Vicson obviously chose blue as a base colour. The associations made with the colour blue fit well with the core values and vision of Vicson: reliability, loyalty and communication.
If you’re picking a base colour for a website or your product, it’s good to realise what the colour preferences of people are. Joe Hallock’s Colour Assignment research shows that men and women have different colour preferences. Noteworthy is that the results show that blue is still the most favoured colour by both men and women. Another surprising result is that purple is very popular amongst women where it hardly shows up in male statistics.
At the same time the University of Illinois conducted research about the favourite shades of both men and women. Their results show that men prefer bright colours, where women give a preference to softer colours as shown in the image below.
In sum, choosing the right colour is very important for your brand launch, website or product. Therefore, it’s very important that you take some time to consider what it is that you want to convey as a brand or as a company and pick colours that suit this message. Add onto this colour with complementary shades and keep your target audience in mind. Don’t forget to take the gender ratio in your target audience into account as well. Gotcha! takes the meaning and effect of colour into account in our work, often a brand already has a predefined set of colours but if you’re looking for advise with regards to colours for a certain campaign, we can help.
