How to Match Your Brand Personality with Your Brand Colors
It's a tough decision when you are starting your business: What should my logo look like and what colors should it have?
There are countless blog articles and posts online and on social media that teach new business owners and entrepreneurs about color psychology. Yellow means happy and cheerful, red means... And so on.
What is the best way to choose your brand color?
As an experienced brand strategist and brand designer, I can tell you: it's not that easy to choose a color. It's not about liking the colors themselves, it's about attracting the customers you want. This means that ideally, you want to evoke emotion in the people you want to become your customers with your branding.
Before you begin, I recommend that you develop a proper brand strategy for your business so that you have a strong foundation for your brand. Your brand is more than just a logo, and the best brands in the world have meaning that evokes emotion in those they want to appeal to, through a certain standing, narratives, stories, messages and - their personality.
Your brand personality is not just a deciding factor in choosing the right colors for your branding and logo design - it's the cornerstone of it.
What is a brand personality?
Your brand personality is a set of characteristics associated with your brand. It may seem a little strange at first to characterise a substance that does not exist, because in the beginning, your brand is just an idea. However, that idea, with its purpose, values, and vision, represents something that appeals to a group of people who are your ideal customers.
This automatically brings us to what you need to do first before you start designing your brand:
Develop your brand strategy
By developing your brand strategy comprehensively and in line with your target audience, you will have clarified the key points required for successful branding, with components such as your brand purpose, vision, values, and knowledge of your target customer persona (hello ideal customer).
Once you have done this, you need to:
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Gain clarity on your brand persona
If you are developing a truly complete brand strategy, brand personality is a part of it. To develop your brand personality, you need to ask yourself: if your brand were a person, what would he or she be like? How would he/she look, behave, talk, act?
Write down at least three characteristics that your brand personality exhibits. Is your brand upbeat, approachable, cheerful? Or more luxurious, feminine and graceful? Is your brand professional and fact-oriented or more brash and rebellious?
These are good starting points, and you could even go further and think of your brand personality as a car, texture, celebrity, and so on. It's a fun exercise that simultaneously gives you clarity on what your brand is and represents and what it does not.
After you have done this successfully, move on to the next step:
Check to see if this persona matches your ideal customer
This is a bit tricky, but if you have done your homework and know exactly who your ideal customer is, then you'll know exactly whether or not a particular brand personality resonates with them. If you are sure that your ideal customer actually sympathises with your brand personality, ask yourself why you think that? How would they interact? Would your ideal customer like to hang out with your brand? Would they be friends? Or would your customer admire and want to follow your brand rather than interact with it?
Once you are done with that, and your brand personality certainly resonates with your ideal customer, think about what colors would match that personality and get clear on why they do.
Here are some examples of how colors and attributes might align and what the brand might look like as a person.
Test your brand color palette
After you have selected the colors you think will resonate with your ideal customers, test them. If you have a focus group that you relied on to develop your ideal customer persona, go back to that group, show them your color scheme, and ask them how they like the colors and what they associate with them. Document your findings and adjust your color palettes as needed.
If you have not had a chance to do this, think of someone in your circle of friends, family or acquaintances who is like or closest to your ideal client and ask them what they think.
Do not ask any of your friends, your mother or your partner for advice or opinions. Everyone has different tastes and sees different things in certain colors. Remember: you are not developing your brand for your mother or your partner, but for your ideal customer who will buy from you.
If you need help developing your successful branding:
Meet your brand designer
Hi there!
I’m Brand Strategist & Squarespace Website Designer and support you in building an emotional connection to your ideal clients through your Branding and Website
