When creating the branding for a professional practice, there are many decisions to make. How do you want someone interacting with your brand to feel? What should the logo look like? What’s your color palette? Often, businesses utilize color psychology for branding—but does that really matter when building your brand?
The Basics of Color Psychology
Color psychology explores how different colors can affect our mood, emotions, and behavior. If you’ve ever associated the color yellow with happiness or joy, or the color red with excitement or energy, you’ve experienced color psychology in action!
Each color has a variety of different meanings associated with it. With branding, color psychology may affect how prospective clients perceive your business and values.
Financial Services Branding Colors
Which colors should you choose for your financial services business? For Verdant Bloom Divorce Consulting, we went with a warm, inviting color palette inspired by botanicals. In her business, Kristen embodies approachability for her clients, and we wanted those feelings to come through the colors we selected.
Law Firm Color Palette
If you own a law firm, you want to select a color palette that’s both professional and unique. When designing the brand for Lady Lawpreneur, we considered her target audience—service providers who feel overwhelmed by the legal side but can’t afford in-house counsel.
For her color palette, we went with welcoming, friendly colors that make the legal side of running a business feel more accessible and less intimidating. They also represent a fun retro theme that is incorporated throughout her branding, photography, and website design.
Is Color Psychology Making Your Brand Blend In?
We know that color psychology influences how prospects perceive your brand. So, you want your financial firm to be perceived as trustworthy. In color psychology, blue is often thought to mean trustworthy. Therefore, you choose a blue color palette and call it a day.
It makes sense, but the problem with this line of thinking is that nearly half of the top financial groups use blue colors for this very reason. And financial firms aren’t the only ones. Blue is also a popular choice for legal firms, as they want to be perceived as reliable—another popular interpretation of the color. They want their prospects to know that they’ll take care of them.
If nearly half of the top financial and legal firms use blue in their color palettes, they all start to look the same. The goal for your firm is to stand out, and you can do that by selecting colors that represent your business’s goals, values, target audience, and how you want prospects to feel when they land on your website.
Why Color Psychology Doesn’t Matter As Much Anymore
As a brand designer, I personally don’t give much weight to color psychology. According to a study by Edelman, 81% of consumers must trust a brand in order to buy from them. But today’s consumers think critically and perform their own research in order to determine that trust—it doesn’t just happen from a brief color psychology association.
Most consumers ask friends and family for a recommendation, read through reviews online, or binge a brand’s social media accounts to see what they’re all about. While color psychology may or may not play a role subconsciously, your prospects will dive deeper into your brand before booking a consultation.
What Matters More Than Color Psychology for Branding
What should you prioritize over color psychology for your professional practice’s branding? Here are some components to build trust between prospective clients and your firm.
Brand Clarity
The foundation your entire practice’s brand is built on is brand clarity. When you have brand clarity, you know exactly who you serve, what transformation you provide, and how you communicate that value.
- Who you serve: This is a specific type of person dealing with a specific challenge. For example, instead of saying you serve women, niche down to serve women navigating a divorce.
- What transformation you provide: Consider the pain points your prospects are struggling with and what solutions you provide. What changes for them after working with you?
- How you communicate the value: The experience you provide is communicated through your words, stories, and positioning. Once you have brand clarity, everything works together for you—your website, networking, and consultations with prospective clients.
Your Values
Showcasing your brand’s values is crucial, because it sets the expectations for future clients. You don’t just want to say you are a values-driven firm; you want to expand on what those values really are. For example, some of our values at Growth Story are come as you are, strategy first, and mutual empathy.
Being upfront about your brand’s values has two purposes:
- Attract clients who are aligned with the values most important to you and them
- Push away clients who would not be a good fit for you
Keep in mind that the content on your website and marketing channels should focus on speaking to your most ideal client rather than appealing to anyone.
Storytelling
Storytelling is a way to build connection and trust with your prospects, and we know trust is one of the key factors they consider when deciding which firm to hire. Be sure to include your firm’s origin story on your website, highlighting how your firm started and what you set out to do in your industry.
Messaging Consistency
Once you feel confident in your brand strategy, stay consistent with your messaging in person, during consultations, and across your website and social media platforms. Consistency and repetition is another way to build trust and stay top-of-mind.
Client Experience and Testimonials
When a prospect researches which firm to hire, they want to know what past clients have said about their experience. Were you responsive, and did they feel supported?
Adding testimonials (even if they’re anonymous) and breaking down the client experience on your website shows what they can expect from working with you. Be sure to check if there are any specific advertising rules for your jurisdiction before including testimonials.
Build a Brand That Reflects Your Expertise
There’s a lot of intention that goes into building your brand, and it’s much deeper than color psychology alone. Your expertise and the level of care you provide for your clients deserve more than that.
If you aren’t sure how to create a brand that fully encapsulates your mission, values, and how you want your clients to feel, click here to schedule a free consultation with Allie, the founder of Growth Story.
FAQs about Color Psychology for Branding
Color psychology is the study of how different colors affect human behavior, mood, and emotions. While color psychology is often a subconscious phenomenon, it’s frequently used in visual branding as a way to emphasize the values specific businesses hold close.
Color psychology is often taken into account for branding. Brands that want to be perceived as creative may incorporate purple. Health brands, such as Whole Foods, may use green. Upbeat and optimistic brands may use yellow. These are traditional color associations, but there is a lot of room to break these rules to stand out.
A common example of color psychology in branding is the color blue for financial firms. Nearly half of the top financial groups use the color blue, because they want prospects to view them as trustworthy.
Legal firms represent another example of this, where blue is also an extremely common color. They want prospects to be able to rely on them with delicate and sensitive matters.
As a brand designer, I don’t give much weight to color psychology when building a brand. Today’s consumer has to trust a business before buying, and that trust is built from far more than colors alone.
Instead, prioritize having clear target audience profiles so you know who you’re talking to, highlighting your values, utilizing storytelling, staying consistent with your messaging, and cultivating and sharing a top-tier client experience. All of those things will lead to connection and trust with your prospective clients.
While there are general guidelines for what each color means, ultimately color psychology is subjective. Depending on your age, culture, and personal experiences, you may associate different things with each color.
Every color could have positive and negative connotations, such as red meaning excitement or anger. You don’t want to come across as representing the latter.
Lastly, by putting too much emphasis on color psychology for your industry, you’re running the risk of blending in and looking like every other financial or legal firm out there. The ultimate goal of branding is to stand out and represent what makes you unique, so don’t be afraid to do something a little different with your branding.