How does colour influence your customers’ purchasing decisions?

New research from Samsung UK Print Division shows how purchasing decisions are influenced by brand colours.

Graham Long, vice president of corporate sales and IT solutions at Samsung UK Print Division, encourages business owners to consider the effects of colour when branding their companies: “Through this research, we wanted to help businesses to understand how colour affects consumer behaviour. From printed documents to the colours of the paint in their offices; the use of colour has an effect which will ultimately impact on a company’s prosperity”.

1000 adults were asked to match colours with previously identified business characteristics. The colour most associated with business prosperity was red. But ‘prosperity’ may mean different things. Certainly the colour red stands out. Our attention is drawn to it as an alert or to be put ‘on notice’. Used effectively it expresses energy, motivation, and courage – ‘get up and go’. So if you like, it’s the colour that shouts the loudest!

Orange communicates abundance and feelings of emotional and physical security. But prosperity can also be expressed by the colour purple which may convey wealth and luxury, or green which is reassuring.

In the study yellow was associated with creativity. Yellow conveys confidence and optimism. Feeling good about ourselves enhances our creativity. Black perceived as the most ‘professional’ colour, communicates gravitas and sophistication. Green, as mentioned earlier is essentially a reassuring colour which was linked to good customer service by participants in the study.

Your customer will react first to the colour of your brand, before they identify any further information about it. It should be your first consideration in design! As Long says – “ If consumers react negatively to a brand, the other design elements must work twice as hard to overcome the powerful negative effect of the colours on the crucial first impression”.