
With promotional products, finding products that match your brand’s color can be a technical challenge. For companies that have built strong associations with their imagery, a specific color is the brand in the same way that a logo is. But a well-chosen color with a small logo can both communicate your brand’s message and cover a large canvas in an aesthetically pleasing way. For t-shirts or many other types of products, it looks tacky to festoon a huge logo across the front. We frequently think about the power of color for branding in promotional products.
#Chroma for hue dmg driver#
And unless your company is doing something like sponsoring a NASCAR driver or a soccer team, your logo will likely be quite small compared to the branded object it’s on. They’re the standard symbolic representation of a company.īut there’s still more to a company than a logo. Logos tend to get the most graphic design attention, and for good reason. To convey friendliness and informality, we choose gray instead of black. The color of the lines in the logo also needed attention.

To complete the logo we chose analogous colors - neighbors to the original color on the color wheel - which together provide a soothing effect. Instead we went to the other side of the color wheel to pick a cooling blue hue. Cecelia Health helps its clients manage diabetes and other chronic diseases through health coaching and technology.īecause Cecelia Health has a nurturing relationship with its customers, the aggressive red hue common with hospital and medical laboratory branding wouldn’t be appropriate. Then we think about how we’d want those customers to perceive the brand.įor example our client Cecelia Health needed a logo and color palette that reflected its role as a healthcare technology company. Here at DMG we start conversations about colors with a review of who a company’s customers are. There’s no one single right color for getting people’s attention: only a right color for each specific brand. A classic example is the color white, which is associated with death and mourning in China, and with purity and innocence in the United States. That means people from different cultures may have different or contradictory associations with colors. That’s especially true when the goal is to get a customer’s attention or to get a customer to take action.Īnother problem with relying on hue too much when choosing marketing colors is that many associations with hues are cultural, not biological. To simplify enormously, in most marketing contexts, saturated colors outperform the low-saturation pastel ones. Kolenda argues value and chroma are worth paying attention to because they actually influence human perception more than hue. Darker colors with more black in them are known as shades, while lighter ones with more white are known as tints.Ĭhroma: This is level of vividness: High chroma colors look saturated, while low chroma colors look washed out. As marketing psychology consultant Nick Kolenda writes: two underappreciated parts of color are: You’ve probably seen infographics that show where logos of famous brands fit on the rainbow.īut there’s more to color than hue. In our culture, each hue brings association such as pink with femininity or black with luxury. The hue of a color is where it fits on the light spectrum between red and violet.

Hue gets most of the attention in the color marketing world, but it shouldn’t.įor those non-artists out there, here’s a brief review of the parts of color: hue, value, and chroma. Whether it’s designing a website or a promotional water bottle, these are the four parts of choosing STOP colors. We’ve taken to calling these colors STOP colors. But one key tactic our office agrees on is the user experience and the big role that vivid, eye-catching colors make in driving customer behavior across our business. Our digital marketing and promotional product marketing teams usually approach strategy in different ways. We know because here at DMG, we specialize in digital marketing and brand activation. It turns out these same tricks work well with in real life marketing applications too. Whether it’s an iPhone notification icon or an email call to action button, there’s no question that high saturation colors and strong contrasting colors compel action in the digital world.
