The Emotions of Color in Marketing
As marketers, we see it all the time… BIG RED LETTERS on landing pages to grab our attention. Different colors make people act differently. RED is usually seen as a “danger” or “warning” color… while BLUE or GREEN is more “soothing” and “trusted“. An excellent example of this was how in Star Wars, Darth Maul is RED and BLACK (representing his evil), and Yoda was GREEN… showing his “stability” and “safety”.
In today’s post I wanted to focus on all of the main colors and how they should be represented in your advertising efforts. Believe it or not, the colors you place on your landing pages or web sites can drastically change your overall conversions and the user’s thinking process. Below is a break down from HP, on the main colors we use for marketing and how they are often looked at by others.
Primary Colors:
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Red |
Red is a very emotionally charged color. It tends to increase the respiration rate and can even raise your blood pressure. It creates excitement and can be associated with danger, war, power, strength passion, desire and love. It can even increase your appetite.
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Yellow |
Yellow is the happy color… it is the color of sunshine. It creates a sense of cheerfulness and helps to stimulate mental activity. When yellow is very bright, it can attract attention. It can also provide a very sharp contrast to dark colors. Yellow can have the appearance of being brighter than white if over used and can be disturbing if used too much.
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Blue |
Blue is a trusted color. It can provide a sense of tranquility and security. It tends to symbolize loyalty, wisdom, trust, faith, confidence, and intelligence. While red can help to increase the appetite, blue tends to have the opposite affect and can actually suppress the appetite.
Secondary Colors:
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Orange |
Orange is the combination of the happiness of yellow and the energy and strength of red. It symbolizes creativity, determination, enthusiasm and success. In addition orange indicates affordability. Because of its similarity to red, it is great to promote food.
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Green |
Green tends to suggest endurance and stability. It represents harmony, growth and freshness. Green indicates safety. Obviously, it is associated with money and wealth. With the interest in “green” products, it is the only color that can promote organic foods and products effectively.
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Violet |
Violet or purple combines the energy and strength of red with the stability of blue. It represents nobility, ambition, power and luxury. It symbolizes extravagance and wealth and is often associated with dignity, independence, wisdom and magic.
Others:
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White |
White is purity, goodness, light and innocence. It is considered perfection. White is generally positive and simple. Often it is the color of charitable organizations, low-fat foods and dairy products.
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Black |
Black is elegant, powerful and formal, but can also be associated with death. In marketing, it is dignified. In certain contexts, black is very negative (blacklist, black humor, etc). It can also denote prestige.
Next time you are working on your landing page or new web site, step back and look at your color scheme and see how your colors are targeting your audience.
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"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
Nice Find! I suggest landing pages pick the right colors that create a sense of urgency. Something like a ticking clock countdown that goes from green to orange to red is a good example.
great post… many people (including myself) don’t put enough energy into this, yet its impact is huge.
Great Post! Very powerfull information and something we all should pay more attention to in our daily work. Thanks Zach.
The title of this most is a bit mis-represented. I wish you would have gone a bit further and given examples on where to use each color on a landing page. This may be obvious for some, but for others it’d be new information, especially for AM newbies.
This should make for a good follow up post.
Very interesting article…
Great post
Thanks
Oh cool, I am Black color then
Based on my research as a requirement to my course (Marketing) the most recommended colors in businesses are red, blue, and yellow. other are colors are used on specialized business like medical, nature something,something. When you will look at uberaffiliate.com, he used color red in his theme, I think he knows this color rules establishing profitable business.
Awesome. This is exactly one of the first things you learn when taking a design class. Colors can make or break a design for a company. They give off subconcious emotions and without the right colors can turn off a potential buyer.
What an interesting post. Now i am going to be paying more attention to the color of people’s site and layout and color distribution.
I prefer blog design which is dominated with blue even I didn’t know the meaning. But now I know…
yeah My blog is in blue… Blue is a major color.
I was really thinking about a blog makeover and now it looks I have a little more to think about. Great info.
An interesting article which gives us an insight into the use of colors. And yes, I agree that red increases one’s appetite. There is something to be said about a girl in red lingerie and high heels.
Jeflin
excellent post there Zac. Nice explanation this deserves to be in my first weekly round up. That should be up on the 4th of August hopefully.
Yeah, I wrote an article about this a while ago on how colors can actually affect the outcome from getting a clickthrough, sign up, a visitor staying for a while, leaving, etc.
Jay
Great post. I have bookmarked it for future use. Thanks
This blog about colours is a great help for choosing the right colours if you want to make a homepage, flyers, and so on… So it depends on the colours, which informations should be representative on such a medium. So I can use the informations for all the workings I want to do in future and it is a great help for me. Thanks
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I liked this post very much, got ideas for choosing a right colors for right marketing strategy. Thanks for it.
I am much more aware of color and what effects different colors have now, it has made me think in terms of the layout and color of my own blog right now and how it can be improved upon.
It was pretty funny to read this post today as, we are 85% finished with the redesign on Blogsavvy.net and when i showed the first version to my wife she said she felt “safe” but I bet you can guess which color the new site was. Keep it up!
So if I follow this line of thinking my blog is trusted, creative and successful…I can live with that!
And speaking of the color ‘red’, I read somewhere that the reason a lot of drivers run through red lights is because red is an action color - it says ‘go,go, go!’ Technically they should have chosen ‘green’ as the stop color as it is more calming.
[…] choice for a Gadget blog since Black also denotes prestige and formality. To find out more on how color scheme plays on emotion in marketing, please see Tyler Cruz […]
Cool, I’m green soothing and trusted.
This is a basic principle that can be applied to almost any situation.. it doesn’t even have to be in marketing…
Super super helpful. Lots of things to think about based on product, offering, message, outcome, user and more. Back to the drawing board…
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Hey, that’s going to come in extremely handy for squeeze pages - thanks for the great find
And yes, I find red and blue are to most effective as well - and the plain white background
Hi.
Great post. I must bookmarked it for the future use.
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Holger