How Brands Dominate Through Color

Any brand design professional will stress the strategic importance of color in the identity you craft for your company and products. It has psychological implications, communicates your personality, and can differentiate you from your competition.

For a current and entertaining take on the subject, you can find an interesting article and infographic on “What the Color of Your Logo Says about Your Brand” in the current AdWeek.

But this isn’t about the color selection and meaning. No, this is about how you use your brand color once when you’re actively implementing it in the marketplace.

Own Your Color – and Your Competition

More specifically, this blog is about companies and brands and how they take a color—their color—and own it.

What got me thinking about this? Well, a certain mobile provider did—if there’s one brand right now that is totally owning a color, in this case “magenta,” it’s T-Mobile.

And when we say, “own” a color, in this case we aren’t hyperbolizing—T-Mobile actually has a trademark in its telecom category for the use of the color magenta in print and online media. No fooling.

Magenta truly has the power to pop. And T-Mobile is out and out bold in its use of the color. One example is its web page takeover and the otherworldly flood of violet-red that bathes my early A.M. darkened room when I fire up the online Wall Street Journal to catch the morning’s headlines.

 The minute the page loads, I know who it is—and for some strange reason I actually pay attention to it, in some way different than other homepage takeovers or online banner ads. The design is interesting, the messaging clear, though not relevant in my case. I really think it’s something about that magenta that creates a hostage as in…I…can’t…not…look…at…it.

Millennials and Color

Perhaps I’m just time traveling backward across generational barriers—research indicates (and so does passing observation) that the Millennial generation is big on bold colors—they like their color and they want lots of it.¹

Maybe it’s just that—this might be a sharp generational marketing strategy by T-Mobile. (And no—T-Mobile is not my mobile provider.)

 I’m certain for others, probably legions, sentiment runs toward the other end of the spectrum, as in assault with a modern-day, digital bludgeon.

 You can find other examples of a dominant color strategy in T-Mobile’s sector, though certainly not with magenta. The French Telecom giant Orange took it even further by branding its company name as a color, a clear and, I think, smart naming decision in the universe of telecom companies.

From Brown to Pink—Powerhouse Color Brands

Let’s briefly hitch a ride on the brand color rainbow look at several other companies that employ color dominance in their marketing.

Brown – UPS, aka United Parcel Service, has always worn the brown with pride, but a few years back it fully embraced its color in an ad campaign driven by the slogan, “What can Brown do for you?” If you’re wondering about how a company even comes to select a color like brown, lore has it that one founder wanted yellow delivery trucks, but the other thought they’d never look clean—and so chose “Pullman Brown” after the railway cars of the same name and color.

Blue – You only think of one company when you say “Big Blue” —IBM. And that’s powerful color branding. Financial analysts gave the tech-consulting giant the moniker because of its dominant and consistent use of blue in its logo, products, and packaging.

MORE Blue – And here in Boise, Idaho, we have one of the best examples of branded color ownership of anywhere on the planet—the “blue turf” of the Boise State football stadium. Speaking of psychological advantages, the Broncos have an 85-4 win/loss record when playing on the home turf since the 2000 football season.²

White – Yes, there are a few colors in the Apple brand palette, but leave it up to this design powerhouse to own white, the absence of light, whether it’s in product design or the ample white space it many of its iconic ads.

Pink – Even though it’s a nonprofit, Susan G. Komen for the Cure is no stranger to powerhouse cause-marketing and professional branding. It turned pink into a powerful symbol for cancer research and survivorship and, like T-Mobile, even trademarked its running pink ribbon. (There can be downsides to a dominant color strategy. Susan G. Komen for the Cure has come under fire for pursuing legal action to protect its trademark against other nonprofits, and its brand also gave rise to the term “pinkwashing,” a pejorative applied by critics to what they see as disingenuous cause marketing.)

Of course there are many more examples in the colors I’ve mentioned, to say nothing of the reds and greens and oranges and…you get the idea. I’m sure you can come up with many other examples of companies that use color to exert brand dominance—maybe even for competitors in your own market category.

How Does Your Brand Use Its Color?

So here’s the key question to address: once your colors are in place, which is the case for brand marketers at all established companies, you must determine how to effectively employ your colors as a strategic asset to compel and differentiate your brand.

Perhaps what’s right in application for your brand is a balanced, nuanced, and sophisticated approach.

Or maybe you just rock it.

(1) http://medallionretail.biz/campus/millennial-color-trends/

(2) http://www.broncosports.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/bosu-m-footbl-tradition.html