Color Psychology: How to Incorporate it Into a Brand Image and Personal Style

What is Color Psychology?

Color emits psychological effects – color psychology. Color stimulates our senses. Color projects sentiments, feelings, and emotions just by wearing it and also when you’re trying to develop a brand image.

What is a Brand Image?

A brand image can be your corporate brand image or the color palette one uses to develop your company branding. Your brand colors should be cohesive throughout your logo, marketing materials, and website. As colors have psychological effects, it’s important to consider what a color projects when choosing your color palette for branding.

Often times you’ll hear graphic designers and website designers refer to your color palette as your personal brand.

However, from an image consultant perspective, your personal brand is your personal brand image – your calling card, your visual logo of who you are, and what you want your image to say about you.

Therefore, color psychology plays an important role when choosing colors for your outfits and a company brand image.

The psychological effect of red

When you see a person in a red dress, what feelings does it evoke?

Does it call your attention? Does she look boring or stimulating? Sexy and assertive? Or could she be dramatic? That’s the color psychology behind red.

Furthermore, when you’re selecting colors to wear, please keep in mind which shade of color you should wear. Not all shades of red are suitable for an individual’s personal coloring. Which shade of red are you attracted to?  Is it brighter or darker? Do you prefer red with more orange or brown?  

Therefore, to learn which colors are your optimal colors, we recommend purchasing our What Are My True Colors eBook for US$34.97, where you’ll discover which shade of red is most suitable for you and more!  

Red for your Business Brand Identity

If you’re choosing red as part of a business brand identity, do you want your company to trigger opposing emotions? Red projects dominance, aggression, and power. As a company color, the color psychology behind red will make you think this company will dominate and control your thoughts and if you do not agree with the company it will provoke feelings of anger and hostility.

So please think about these things when you’re choosing red as part of a corporate brand identity.

The color psychology behind yellow

When you see a person in a yellow dress, what feelings does it evoke?

Does she look bright?  Like a ray of sunshine?  Cheerful and happy? Isn’t that someone you would want to spend time with?

However unfortunately we hear many people say they can’t wear yellow.  Mainly it’s because they don’t think yellow looks good on them or they don’t know which shade of yellow to pick for themselves.  That’s also when our eBook comes in handy.  Are you more likely to pick a brownish yellow or a pastel yellow?

YELLOw for your Business Brand Identity

However, when you see yellow as part of a business brand identity, will it project the same things?  All colors also have a negative effect.  Therefore, the overuse of yellow could heighten a sense of agitation and aggression.  Therefore, it best to use yellow in your brand colors in moderation.  Some brands that successfully use yellow are McDonalds, Ferrari, and Subway.

The color psychology behind blue

When you see a person in a blue dress, what feelings does it evoke?

Does she look calm, peaceful, or tranquil? Or perhaps some of the girls look reliable and stable?  Does she look honest and loyal? Or sincere or reserved?

Now which blue would you choose for you?  Would you go darker blue and what’s the color psychology around that? Reliable and stable.  Or would you go lighter or warmer? Again, the eBook would be your best resource.  As fashion consultants, what’s trending are the lighter colored blue dress styles featured here.

Although puffed sleeves are still also trending. Therefore, if you’d like to look reliable and stable but still approachable, that’s a great dress to buy! To look more sophisticated, we’d go with the navy blue shift dress by Likely. To look more classic, go with the Frank and Eileen shirt dress.

All these looks are incidentally clickable, shoppable links.

BLUE for your Business Brand Identity

In our opinion blue is the best color for business because it projects honestly, responsibility, and trust. This is why blue is one of the most popular colors to use in business to build a business brand identity. Use blue with a neutral color or with other colors. Play with the color psychology and you’ll see that if you mix blue with yellow your business brand identity will look trustworthy and optimistic – aka. fun, happy, cheerful.

COLOR HARMONY

We are only discussing the color psychology of these three colors because we discuss the psychological effect of colors in detail during our image consultant and personal stylist training programs online and in-person.

The reason why we chose these three colors in particular is to also introduce the concept of color harmony. Red, yellow, and blue are triadic colors. Why is that important? It is one way to mix and match color. Learn more of these concepts and become an expert on color analysis with our Color Analysis Training Online course.

---