What color is your brand?  Do the colors of your logo match the personality of your company?  Or at least the image you're trying to project? 

 

While attending Global Shop in Chicago last week, I was fortunate enough to catch several inspirational conference sessions about retail design.  One common theme was the importance of making an emotional connection with consumers, and how companies can do this through great design.  Another common theme was color.  And on more than one occasion the two themes were combined. 

 

How can designers use color to emotionally connect consumers with their brand?

 

Brian Priest of Upshot shared the example of West Elm, a furniture and home accessory store that categorizes its products by color rather than product type.  Instead of designing separate sections for pillows, lamps and couches, the products are integrated in rooms of blue, green, orange-- creating a much more emotional shopping experience.  A more abstract example given by Emotional Branding author Marc Gobe is a Sao Paulo convenience store that stocks its shelves according to the colors of product packaging creating aisles of colorful "murals". 

 

In both examples, the unique use of color is very purposeful, making a brand statement and certainly connecting on some emotional level with the consumer.  But what about the more subtle use of color that you might find in brand id's? 

 

For fun, I clicked around on the internet to find out what the colors of our brand logo might subconsciously convey to customers.  And what I discovered was pretty right on with the personality of our company.