A mini blog on colour

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Colour me bad – Colour me good

Colour is of course all around us, and right from the very earliest stages of our cognitive development plays a really important role in helping us distinguish shape and form in and around the world we live in. 

For a child, understanding the familiar forms around us helps us process the new in our lives that we encounter on a daily basis, with our conscious and subconscious mind soon developing that habit of colour identification so that we begin to associate certain colours with concepts, messages, ideas, and emotions. And it is these associations that continue to affect how we judge and react with our environment as we grow into consumers.

For instance, you may not be aware of it but your brain will acknowledge and associate sense and emotion to the green-ness of the grass, the blue-ness of the sky, the darkness of the night and the red-ness of the traffic light that instantly tells us to stop. You can recognise much about the world from the colours within it, the temperature of sand in the desert or snow in the arctic, all from their colour and your own experiences, and all without physically touching them. And, through exactly that same cognitive process, you will recognise and associate meaning to companies, products and services by simply looking at the colour of their logo.

As brand marketers this is not new thinking of course, but at points its always just and right to remember that to embed that which is ‘us’ in our buyer cognition colour theory really does have a critical role to play in designing the identities that clothe and speak for our brands, products and businesses.