The 7 Primary Colors For Branding + What NOT To Ever Use

In this episode, I'm breaking down the 7 primary colors you should be choosing for your brand color, + sharing what I think you should never use!

More specifically, this episode dives into:

• My journey with color psychology
• The seven primary colors for branding
• Physical and emotional reactions to color
• How color psychology supports your messaging
  
  

P.S. Find your perfect brand color in minutes. Take the FREE QUIZ here!

Transcript

Welcome to the visible entrepreneur podcast season five. I'm your host, Michelle Lewis, founder of visibility vixen. I've spent years studying color psychology, branding, visibility and publicity, all geared to help you hit your goals faster than anyone else. I'm a TEDx speaker, Amazon Best Selling Author and have helped 1000s of entrepreneurs worldwide with their visual presence. This season, we're diving deep into color, why it's needed, how to use it in your branding, and how audiences subconsciously and physically react to it. My goal is to help you blow up your brand in the best way to attract your ideal audience, subconsciously, I run two programs, the color course and the visibility lounge. So if you're ready for growth, go to visibility vixen.com To get started today, in the meantime, let's dive into today's episode. And if you think this is a topic that a business bestie, or a friend of yours, or even a relative would love, do me a favor, forward it to them. And let's dive in to this episode. Hey, and welcome back to the visible entrepreneur Podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking about one of my favorite subjects color, of course, but we're going to be breaking it down really tangibly into the seven primary colors you should be choosing from, for your brand color and what not to ever use. So if you want to dive deeper into this concept, I highly recommend taking the color quiz, you can find that at visibility vixen.com, forward slash color quiz, we will also be linking that below. This will give you some great ideas on what could possibly be your new brand color. Or maybe you've already chosen it and you're going to get the same result and you'll feel even stronger about it. So jump on over there and feel free to take the quiz, it will only take a minute or two. So as we dive into color, I want to explain the journey that I've been through to get to this point, because I think some people are like, Oh, I can just talk to anyone about color and color psychology. And even people who say that they've studied color psychology can sometimes they've only studied one part. So let me explain to you what I've done. There's so many different ways to look at color. And remember, Color Psychology is looking at specific hues to study as a determinant of human behavior, right. So that specific aspect of study is how colors directly correlate to people's behavior and or emotions, right. For example, people have studied gray specifically to see how it affects people over a long period of time, which suppresses a lot of energy and can lead to states of sadness or depression, for example. The other things that are needed in order to truly understand how to use color are a couple of things. The first one is in design, for example, interior design, designing a building, designing a website, those kinds of aspects of using color, because it's different. For example, you can find a correlation between arguments with couples or families, depending on whether or not their environment, specifically dining room or bedroom has red as a predominant color scheme, that kind of thing. So it's really interesting to study that. But we can't stop there. For me, I wanted to also know scientifically, what colors did and how they resonated with the body. So you have to look at the science of the specific wavelengths and frequencies of the colors, or do they lie on the visible light spectrum, there's only six that really are in that spectrum, the rest are not. So that's really important to know, then I really love studying color science, because that is just fascinating on how you can use specific colors to create scientific Lee measurable phenomena in the body. Specifically for healing and regeneration, you've probably heard of red light therapy, that is using color science. So that also I think is just crazy fascinating. But for me, it did not stop there. I also wanted to look at how color was used in film. Because if you think about it as people look at our brands and interact with us on social media, on our website, even on Zoom calls, they are looking at a screen very much like we sit down and watch Netflix and watch a movie. So it's important to understand how an audience reacts to color in terms of when people are speaking with any type of story undertone, right? The last but not least, just because this is my personal journey. I dealt with a lot of illness, especially in my late teens and early 20s. So I also studied how light frequencies were absorbed into certain plants to then once we took them verbally in tease whatever
to lead to healing for specific parts of the body, which kind of ties into color science. But anyway, that's the background of how I have studied color over the past five or six years, probably if you include my film career much longer than that, I think it's important to understand all of those aspects of color. Because then it helps me to educate you to make the right decision in a holistic way about your brand. For example, I
got a message in my inbox yesterday, and someone was like, Well, I hear you talk about color psychology. So tell me about purple.
And it's like, if I could write a full page, if not pages about Purple Purple specifically. And it's not as easy as me boiling it down to one thing and you going, okay, great. I chose right. You know, I mean, we have to have this holistic understanding of our brand color to truly understand what we're communicating when we wear it, because it will give you so much empowerment every time you get on an interview. Every time someone comes to your website, every time you present an offer, every time you post on social media, these are the considerations. And you can know with absolute certainly certainty, that you're not only attracting your ideal client, but you're also nurturing and supporting them through your education process. So let's start talking about what I believe the seven primary colors should be in branding, and even more importantly, what colors you should never use as a primary color inside of your branding. Okay. So if you look at a color wheel, you're going to see red, orange, and yellow, and you're going to see green, blue, and purple, you're not going to see pink. But I do include pink as one of the colors that is the seventh color, in my opinion. But let's talk about why. Why when you're looking at a color chart, do you not see pink on that color wheel? And the answer is pink. And or magenta is actually a color that the brain invents to transition between red. And I believe it's purple, red and purple. The brain invents this color. Isn't that fascinating. And what's even more fascinating is because I didn't use to include pink, but did my homework and now do you can't deny the fact that pink has a tangible effect on the body. I think I've mentioned a previous episode where they did an experiment where they painted this admission cell at a prison pink and then it calms a person down. It took 15 minutes, I think the person calmed down, then they released them into, you know, wherever they were going. And the effect lasted for 30 minutes. And the person who did that study said it is impossible for someone to accelerate their heart rate in a very daunting pink environment. So even though the brain invents this color as a transitional color, we still react to it. So it is important that we include pink in this color wheel because it does have such an effect on someone's body. So let's start with pink, I don't really have a pink, I have my little color balls here. If you're watching this on video, pink isn't in any of this. And that's why. So that also is backing up what I'm saying. But pink is very helpful in helping someone feel compassion, safe, warm, calm, right. So pink is a very strong color to help someone feel that, but also there's magenta magenta has a little bit more of a different quality, it's a little bit more of a revolution and a call to arms. Okay, so now let's go over the other six, which are the red, the purple, the blue, the yellow, the orange, and which way missing the green. These I believe are all very strong primary colors that you can choose for your branding, because they all resonate in the visible light spectrum. That means that they're in that beautiful range of colors. If you want to look at this even closer watch the sky, you're gonna see every single color except for green. But green is all around us in our natural environment. And yes, you could say, Well, Michelle, the northern lights up green, so
that's true, too. So that's the first thing they are all measurable in the visible light spectrum. That means that the body has a physical reaction to seeing the color because they're in all the colors of light. So it's really important that we pull from that versus the colors that are not in the visible light spectrum, therefore do not affect the body. These are colors that I do see in branding like gray, brown, black and white. Now I'm not saying that you can't use these in your brand. I'm saying don't make them the primary color because we want our primary color to touch the person that's looking at us, right we want them to have a physical, emotional, mental reaction when they see us right we want them To feel hope, or inspiration, or courage or excitement or motivation, whatever that primary emotion is, we want them to feel something. And if they're looking at Brown, or gray, or black or white, you might say, Well, someone might feel something, they might, but it is not going to register very strongly, because it's not in the visible light spectrum. They are also not chakra colors. Whatever science you study, I could go on and on specific light corresponds to different organs. And those organs also are not going to respond to gray, brown, black and white. So that's why I encourage you, if you are attracted to those colors, if you must have them in your brand, that's absolutely fine. Just make them one of the supporting colors do not make them a primary. So with the colors of red, the other six that we talked about, so that's red, orange, yellow, and green, purple, blue, they're not only on the visible light spectrum, they are also each tied to a chakra or organ, you can study this in all kinds of medicines, all kinds of natural healing, all kinds of even meditation and yoga practices. Every culture has some site sort of relationship to what they may or may not call chakras. So that's another reason why those are the colors that I've chosen, they can be very helpful in different stages of healing. They also are all recognized in film, as strong colors to use in order to bring about a strong response with an audience, whether it's fear, or excitement, or sadness, or joy, or stillness, or mysticism. Whatever it may be, every single one of these six colors is used. And I would say seven, because if you study pink, and film, that's like a whole nother thing, right. So that's why these six colors are so important. That's why these are the main ones that I like to choose from, you might be saying, Michelle, just tell me what every color means, like I said, that is reserved for the color course. Because I go into all this in crazy detail, you have to take all these things into consideration. And then last but not least, you have to consider the culture of where you are being seen, where you're advertising where most of your customers are coming from, because there's also color that is specific to culture. So it's a really fascinating process. And it's something that I've seen where you can start here with your brand. But if you put attention at this starting block of your brand, it relates to everything. It will work in your messaging, in your marketing, in your sales process, in your conversion process of how people relate to you how you book press, how you are at your events or events that you're speaking at, it just goes on and on and on, all stemming down from color. Imagine all the work that you put into messaging, all the work you put into marketing, if you added this component into your business, what could change, I just find it fascinating. Like I said, I've seen it work time and time again. So if you're reading, you want to jump right into the color course, please do that you can go to visibility vixen.com, I'd love to have you in there so that we can dive into each color, specifically, and what it means in each of these areas. We'll also be working on your brand palette and helping you with your website in your entire visual presence. This goes hand in hand with everything you've already done to build your business. This just gives you that visual fuel and push so that people can see you for all of this hard work that you've done on your brand. They're gonna be able to subconsciously understand instantly who you are and what you do that supports the message they're seeing that you're putting out there to go. That's my right person I'm going to buy right now. That is what color psychology is. That's why all the big businesses use it. That's why they make so much money especially from their commercials. And if you don't believe me, go check out some commercials and start watching know which brands use which colors and report back. Anyway, I
hope you enjoyed this little tasting of the six sorry, the seven primary cause you should be using your brand pink included and the ones that you should not be using. We'd love to hear your feedback. So come on over to any social channel at visibility Vixen, and shout me out or you can send me an email I would love to hear from you. And feel free to join our Facebook group to the visible entrepreneur. We're doing classes every week having a great time over there. Alright, I will see you later. Have a great rest of your week. Go out there and choose your primary brand colors with some confidence. I hope you love this episode as much as I did. Now we're all about building a tribe here is the visible entrepreneur so be sure to subscribe, leave a five star review and then head on over to the Facebook group. It's a great place where you can practice your video, live stream and really enjoy the community that we have built in the meantime I'll see you in the next episode now get out there and get more visible