Source: The Psychology of Design: The Color Blue in Marketing & Branding

Colour Psychology

Psychologists have understood that colour is an important emotional trigger. Hospitals were designed with green, as it is a soothing colour for a stressful time. Colour Psychology is now a hot topic in Marketing. Researchers have now made important discoveries regarding the psychology of color and its impact on mood, feeling and behaviour.

Why Blue?

The Blues in Marketing – As dull as it may sound and as sad as you may thing the blues are, in Marketing, it is an entirely different affair!

“Blue is known for its trust and dependability. It’s reliable, responsible, and mentally soothing. For that reason alone, it’s one of the most-liked colors across the entire world.” – CoSchedule.

Blue is a distinctive colour known to emote trust. It is also associated with quality and reliability and has become the darling of high tech companies such as IBM (known as BIG BLUE). Ford, Chase, Lowes, GE and Samsung are also big blue brands.

In Tourism, Sandals, a Luxury All-Inclusive Resort, uses blue predominately on all its websites. Blue and white are their prime colours. It signifies all noted above but it is also the colour of their Sea and Sand Vacation Destinations. Aside from representing Caribbean holidays, the blue and white combination has the highest score of trust of all colours.

Sandals recently added Black to their website navigation. The various shades of black denote quality more that any other colour. It is a clever use of colour to represent their brand and the destinations they work in.

Blue and white are the Colours of the Caribbean – Ocean, See and Sand. It’s also the colours of Sandal Resort Brand!

The Social Media Leaders Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn use blue extensively. In Marketing, Salesforce and Constant Contact are bluers. In Finance, American Express, Visa and PayPal choose blue!

And the list goes on…

The point is that big brands understand that colour is important and use it accordingly.

In a recent test by HubSpot A/B tested call-to-action (CTA) colors, they found that just changing the colour of the Call To Action (CTA) increased the conversion rate. They also discovered that some colours work better than others. In their test, a red CTA button outperformed a green CTA button by 21%.

Colour Theory

Primary colours are the main ingredients for colour at large. But what they are depends on your point of view.

If you are an artist, then it’s the pigment that matters most.

If you are looking at light as the source of colour, your primary colours would be cyan, magenta and yellow.

For print, it’s CMYK and for screens or monitors, it’s RGB.

For general purposes in art and design, it’s red, blue and yellow. These are the 3 colours we need to make all others and they are the building blocks of colour psychology in marketing.

Colour Psychology

Understanding colour is helpful in design but it may not help you understand what colour means in terms of mood and emotion. For that you need to talk to a colour psychologist.

Blue has powerful positive and negative emotional resonance and like all colours, one must use it wisely.

Blue’s emotional triggers are widely seen in nature – from the Blue Ocean to the Blue Sky to Blueberries. Because of these emotional connections, blue is omnipresent in marketing.

Other colours each have a different significance that may be more aligned to what you do, who you are and the emotional.

Just click on the blue chart here to see the spectrum of colours and their personality traits and meanings.