08 Dec WHAT COLOURS TELL YOU?

EVER WONDERED WHAT COLOURS TELL YOU? MAYBE YOU’VE NEVER EVEN THOUGHT OF COLOURS LIKE THIS BEFORE?

Colour has always played an important role in the way you communicate your BRAND personality and message to your business prospects. What colours tell you affects your emotional state as there is substantial energy that emanates from different colours.

Colours also affect everyone in an intuitive level. Emotional attributes become anchored to colours and they can create a powerful impact, without the use of words, as humans naturally observe colours first when given a visual message. Thus, your reactions are triggered strongly based on these cues. The ability to distinguish colours comes as inherited DNA from our ancestors, to whom successful survival in nature was interlinked with an ability to differentiate potentially harmful elements partially based on colour.

Cold colours such as blue, turquoise, teal and silver promote honesty, compassion, caring and conservative values, whereas warmer colours such as orange, yellow and red encourage passion and potency, speed, playfulness and spontaneity and even anger. Black along with silver and gold emphasize elegance, luxury and an opulent quality, also associated with power, performance and competence. Green encourages harmony and sophistication and purple promotes formality and has spiritual connotations. White has an element of light and currently has very popular minimalistic appeal. While white possesses the power of purity, it is also crucial to mindfully balance white with other colours.

Many of these associations are again based on beliefs dating back to the dawn of human development. Warm colours, connects to the burning heat of the sun, and creates emotions of stimulation and vitality, whereas cooler colours bring water and the sky to mind, along with a distancing effect that can also encourage analytical thinking and a serene sense of balance. Colourology is an alternative healing method focusing on the psychological effects of colour-related emotional treatment – intense red is believed to increase circulative functions, while cool blue is considered to carry a cleansing effect.

The brightness and hue of colour also effect perception, and a myriad of emotional associations can also be experienced within a single colour. Consider the differing impact between a lush crimson red and a cool shade of salmon, or compare the impact of electric red to rusty red. Naturally, the context of culture and individual elements, have strong significance in determining the primary observation of colour. Again using the example of red, in Chinese culture it represents good fortunes and festivity, in the West it is the colour of excitement, and in some South African cultures it can represent the colour of mourning.

Spend some time thinking about this fascinating concept of what colours tell you and how it can work for you. Clarify the attributes you wish to convey and then use colour cleverly to target your core audience and if you’re stuck, attend one of my workshops and let me help you make business sense of all this.

To your expert success!

MIKE BYRON