How to Choose Brand Colors That Reflect Your Business

Color is one of the most powerful tools in branding. It not only attracts attention but also plays a vital role in shaping customer perception, evoking emotions, and influencing purchase behavior.

A brand that explores color psychology can use color strategically to tap into subconscious cues and emotional triggers. In a visually saturated marketplace, your brand's colors are often your first — and most lasting — impression.

Choosing the right brand colors is not about preference or trend. It's about strategy. Colors help define your brand’s voice, personality, and values, even before a customer reads a word of your messaging. A thoughtfully selected color palette supports consistency, builds emotional connection, and sets you apart from competitors.

What Is a Color Scheme?

A color scheme is a curated group of colors used to maintain visual harmony in your brand identity. It ensures that all brand assets — from your logo and website to packaging and social media — look cohesive and purposeful.

Typically, a brand color scheme includes a primary color, a few secondary colors, and neutral tones to balance the overall composition. Using a combination of primary and secondary colors can enhance the overall brand feel and visual appeal across various marketing materials.

These schemes can be monochromatic (variations of one color), analogous (colors that sit next to each other on the color wheel), or complementary (colors that contrast and enhance one another). The type of scheme you choose should align with your brand’s personality and message.

Understanding the Prime Color Chart

Before diving into specific palettes, it’s helpful to understand the meanings behind the most commonly used brand colors — often referred to as the prime color chart. Blue often symbolizes trust, honesty, and professionalism, which is why it’s favored by financial and tech companies. Red expresses energy, urgency, and passion — ideal for brands that want to spark excitement or action.

Different hues of the same color can convey distinct emotional associations. For example, a light blue hue might evoke calmness and serenity, while a dark blue hue can suggest reliability and authority.

Green reflects health, money, and balance, making it popular among wellness and sustainability brands. Purple suggests creativity and luxury, while black offers sophistication and strength. White represents purity and minimalism. Yellow, which we’ll explore in more detail, communicates youthfulness, optimism, and creativity.

How Many Colors Should a Brand Color Palette Have?

When crafting the brand identity of your business, one of the preliminary steps is selecting the appropriate number of colors for the company logo. However, you shouldn’t go overboard, as the most successful brands navigate between 3 to 5 colors. The main colors contribute significantly to the psychological impact of a brand's identity, creating a balanced user experience by combining different emotional effects. Here is my approach to tackling this:

• Primary Color: This is the first color the audience associates with the brand. For example, Facebook is known for its blue, while Coca-Cola is recognized for its red.
• Secondary Colors: These do not overshadow your primary color. Instead, they act as supporting shades. These colors can showcase different brand parts or be reserved for special situations.
• Neutral Colors: Black, white, and gray are usually used to help balance the palette while allowing for more freedom with text, images, and borders.

Using the same color consistently across all branding materials enhances brand awareness and identity by creating strong associations and emotional connections with consumers.

Source: VistaPrint

Less is always more, and this notion is backed by evidence. If your brand identity uses too many colors, it is likely to get diluted, causing confusion among the audience. This makes careful selection and limited use of shades vital for better brand recognition.

Core Steps for Color Selection

Examine Brand Values and Aesthetics: Devote time to comprehensively analyze your brand’s core values, mission, and character. Make sure that the colors you choose embody these attributes for a consistent and honest brand image that connects with your audience.

Understanding brand color descriptors is essential for effective collaboration with design teams, ensuring precise communication during the color selection process. Creating comprehensive brand guidelines can help teams decide on color associations that reflect the brand's identity and values.

Know Your Target Market’s Wishes: Study your target audience’s age, values, and culture about color usage to select color(s) that appeal to them and give them confidence in your brand. This will improve your relationship with them.

Investigate Competitors’ Preferred Colors: Identify the prevalent color schemes in your area of focus to pick any applicable patterns and avoid monotony. This will help your brand stay relevant, memorable, and different from the competition.

Try Different Color Blends: Try different blends while focusing on accessibility features for people with low eyesight or color blindness. Always aim for a blend that enhances ease of use for every user.

Now that you understand how to select colors based on brand and audience insights, let’s explore how real companies apply these principles in practice. Understanding color’s appearance is crucial when creating a precise brand color palette, as it involves the varying effects on color when modifiers such as black and white are added.

Technical Considerations

When working on a color strategy, there are key considerations to keep in mind for your branding to remain robust and continuous across all platforms and mediums:

• Adapting Your Palette: Your palette must be adaptable to work for a website, social media, packaging, and print. A flexible sound palette allows the brand to have a strong visual identity. Think about adding different shades and tones for other brand applications.
• Branding Color Levels: If branding comes to mind, primary and secondary levels must be clear. Primary colors should be the core elements of your brand, used heavily, and second colors should act as accents to enhance the design and ensure visual interest. Maintaining this structure provides a balanced and consistent visual identity.

Documenting color codes in brand guidelines is crucial to ensure that all team members can effectively implement the designated colors and maintain a coherent brand identity. Additionally, adhering to the Pantone Matching System is essential for accurate color representation in branding and marketing materials.

Source: LinkedIn

• Color Adaptation for Screens and Color Print: Colors are omnipresent but can look different, so knowing the difference between what looks good on digital and printed material is key. For digital use, ensure the colors are optimized for RGB, which is for screens, and CMYK, which is for printed pieces, to elevate the accuracy of the piece.
• Code of the Colors and Their Use All Over: It is essential to establish these codes, whether Hex, RGB, or CMYK, for brand integrity in all marketing mediums. These codes ensure accurate color matching of your brands everywhere, from digital platforms to printed forms, building confidence among your audience. This associative thinking makes it easy for the audience to relate these colors with the right brands.

Responsive systems are easier to assemble and maintain, such as brand campaigns or other activities a company might need to do or make in the future. It is one thing for colors to look good and one thing to adapt to a fully functional system. A powerful color strategy sets the stage for your brand’s visual image and communication.

Psychology of Color in Business

Understanding the psychology of color is key as it contributes a lot to user behavior and brand image. Colors play a major role in consumer behavior and decision-making, influencing purchasing choices, brand perception, and overall customer engagement. Every color brings with it certain feelings, which determine how people perceive brands and their products.

It is important to avoid personal preferences when selecting brand colors. Decisions should be based on an objective assessment of how colors align with brand goals and customer perceptions.

For example, blue is considered a color of trust and professionalism, which is why it is often used in banks. At the same time, red reflects energy and captures people’s urgency, thus being used in sales and marketing strategies.

Source: HuffPost

More so, cultural interpretation of color is also a factor as a color that means wealth in one culture could be entirely different in another. This is especially crucial for businesses planning to reach a global audience.

Industry trends also influence color selection. Tech businesses usually select quiet colors such as blue and grey, while green and earthly colors are common in health and wellness brands as they reflect vitality and balance.

A business with color intelligence can explore color meanings to establish branding that strikes an emotional chord, including sustainable impressions, while meeting demands from culture and industry.

Colors And Their Qualities

How people perceive different colors can be subjective and can be impacted by culture and other factors. That is why you need to understand who your customers are, where they are from, etc.

Understanding the color spectrum is vital for selecting colors that resonate with your brand’s identity, appeal to your target audience, and enhance brand recognition. A bright color palette can evoke feelings of vitality, creativity, and youthfulness, making it an excellent choice for brands targeting a younger audience.

Before choosing the colors you want to use for your branding, you should test them to ensure they are the best choice for your brand identity traits target audience.

• Blue – honesty, competence, trustworthiness, and reliability.
• Red – Attractive, exciting, angry, and loving.
• Green – Money, health, balance, and knowledge.
• Purple – Royalty, respect, creativity, and mystery.
• White – Purity, space, neutrality, and innocence.
• Black – seriousness, sophistication, and intelligence.
• Yellow – Happiness, youth, and adventure.

You need to research and choose your brand and target customers to ensure you make a good decision when choosing the branding colors. You can hire a branding design firm to help you make the correct choices if you need to know which ones to make.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

How to Choose Brand Colors

Choosing the correct branding color is going to take a lot of work. Before doing this, you must know what brand message you want to communicate to your customers.

Understanding your brand identity and brand personality traits is crucial before choosing the brand’s primary color and brand color. Once you know this, you can choose the primary brand color that helps provoke customers’ emotions. Understanding color terminology can significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of the brand color selection process, enabling clearer communication with design teams.

You need to understand your business stand, brand identity and how you want people to perceive your business. If you have yet to learn this, figure it out before proceeding.

Color combinations and complementary colors you choose matter as well. One color may provoke a specific customer emotion, but combining two colors could change that. The more additional colors that are added, the more complexity will increase.

You must have a strong understanding of color psychology to make the correct decision. That’s why many businesses hire a branding and design agency to help them do all of this.

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

When selecting the appropriate colors for your brand, there are several factors to consider:

• Target audience: Before choosing specific hues, consider who you’re trying to reach with your branding efforts. Different demographics respond differently to various shades, and understanding their preferences can help you select a palette that resonates with them emotionally.
• Budget: Colors can be expensive depending on the medium used; if you’re printing materials or creating web designs on a tight budget, you may need to dial back the number of hues included in your branding scheme to stay within budget constraints.
• Brand consistency: Keeping all marketing materials consistent is essential when creating an effective brand identity. By keeping new hues added complementary or slightly contrasting, ensure they do not detract from or confuse existing primary colors.

Ultimately, the number of primary and secondary colors used in a brand’s visual identity depends on the company’s goals and target audience. Some businesses may opt for just one or two primary colors across all marketing materials.

Others may incorporate multiple hues analogous color scheme to differentiate between products or services within the same organization. Regardless of the approach, it’s essential to consider how different shades can influence consumer perception and behavior when selecting appropriate brand colors.

Picking The Colors For Your Brand Identity

There are many ways to pick brand colors. There are different ways to choose the most color meanings the right colors; they are all excellent methods. This is because colors and the emotions they make people feel can be subjective.

Using a color palette generator can assist in creating cohesive color schemes essential for effective branding. It helps define brand identity, ensures consistency across various mediums, and streamlines the color selection process to enhance overall visual impact.

Usually, a brand will have up to four primary and secondary colors in its branding. If you choose more, the design can look messy. This will give a wrong first impression to everyone who sees it. If you are having difficulty deciding, remember to keep the design simple.

The base color you choose needs to reflect the essential characteristics of your brand’s identity. What do you want people to think about your brand?

Answer this question first, selecting a color that matches your answer. This is the most critical color and will be present in all parts of your branding. You must ensure it looks good and your target customers like it.

The accent color you choose needs to match the base color. These brand colors should complement each other. They will be used together in your branding. Accent colors need to reflect a characteristic of your overall brand identity too, so don’t choose any color that looks good. There should be a reason behind all of your choices.

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash

The neutral color will be the primary one used for the background of your branding and designs, as well as your website. It is usually white or gray. If you choose a dark blue or black, you must ensure it doesn’t affect the other colors when they are used together.

Before deciding on your own brand palette and colors, you need to test them. Get feedback from your target customers and change the brand color palette if necessary. The various color schemes and combinations you choose need to be liked by your customers. Experimenting with different color combinations can help you achieve the desired brand identity and ensure your choices resonate with your audience.

An illustrative example of thoughtful color palette integration is our work on Meta’s Terragraph project. We ensured visual consistency across all platforms by developing a custom color palette harmonizing with Meta’s branding, reinforcing brand recognition and trust.

Real-World Brand Examples: Thoughtful Color in Action

Haus

Haus, a modern aperitif brand, combines warm amber hues with sage green and beige packaging. This palette reflects its all-natural ingredients and artisanal approach while appealing to a design-conscious, health-aware audience.

The colors are subtle yet evocative, setting Haus apart from the traditional deep reds and blacks of the liquor industry. These color choices also reflect Haus's brand's personality traits, emphasizing its commitment to natural, high-quality ingredients and a sophisticated, modern lifestyle.

Color takeaway: Color combinations rooted in nature help communicate craftsmanship and health-consciousness.

Source: drink.haus

Monzo

Monzo, a UK-based digital bank, uses a vivid coral pink for its debit card — a striking and unconventional choice in the traditionally conservative finance space.

While its core digital palette includes blues and dark greys for trust and professionalism, the coral card becomes a powerful visual signature, signaling innovation and youthfulness.

This choice has notably helped increase brand recognition, making Monzo stand out in a competitive market by creating more memorable experiences for consumers.

This choice is a result of strategic brand marketing, where the brand marketing team leverages data and insights to create a color palette that aligns with Monzo’s core values and goals, ensuring the colors resonate with the target audience’s perceptions and emotions.

Color takeaway: A bold accent color can break industry norms and make a lasting impression.

Source: ukinvestormagazine

Read More:

• Enhancing Your Brand Image: Expert Tips and Strategies
• Transform Your Brand Perception with Pro Secrets and Strategies
• Unlocking the Secrets of Purposeful Brand Development
• What is Brand Perception? Transform It with Pro Secrets and Strategies

Conclusion

Make sure to use the right colors because they define how good the user experience will be and how strong the brand's image will be. Ensure your brand image is enhanced by blending with your strengths around colors.

Consistency is the trick, as are regular checks for changes in business direction, user negative comments, and industry-first-aided design trends. Under the right conditions, color can positively impact people and their environments, making everything seem better.