Jenni Romaniuk’s research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute backs this up. Colour consistently ranks at the bottom for both fame—how many people recognise the colour and link it to the right brand—and uniqueness—how few other brands could plausibly claim it too.
Read more
My guide to building distinctive brand assets covers Romaniuk’s fame-and-uniqueness grid in full. It also includes plenty of examples and thoughts on how small businesses can build distinctive brand assets.
Another study by JKR and Ipsos backs Romaniuk’s research up. It found that only around 4% of brand colours are distinctive enough on their own for people to attribute them to the right brand without seeing other elements or hearing the name.
But when colour alone is this weak in linking back to your brand, why should you spend so much thought on choosing your colour palette in the first place?
No one experiences colour in isolation. And when combined with other brand elements, colour is much more effective in building recognition. For example:
- Red Bull’s blue and silver rectangles always appear together on the can.
- Whittaker’s gold background always pairs with the same cursive script logo and almost always with a chunky slab lettering for the flavour.
Pairing colour with your other brand assets and sticking to that combination long-term is one half of the equation. The other half is picking the right colour in the first place—and that’s where most advice misses some depth.
Many resources on brand colours talk about colour psychology and stop there. The idea is that you choose blue for a trustworthy brand and red to create excitement.
I build colour palettes for clients for a living, and that’s not how I approach it. It misses a few crucial aspects.
Even a single colour has dozens of variations. A very muted blue can feel calm and reassuring, while a bright indigo can feel energetic and bold, even though both are blue.
This approach also doesn’t consider your positioning, your audience, and your competition. If every brand in your category has already settled on blue, even the best-chosen blue won’t help you stand out or stand for something.
This article walks through the process I use with small and medium-sized businesses working without a big agency budget. It covers what the research supports and how to build a functional colour system. It also goes into the mistakes I see most often.
What is a brand colour palette?
It might sound obvious, but it’s worth getting specific about.
A brand colour palette should never just be a collection of colours you like. A well-built colour system survives every touchpoint—from your invoice to your Instagram grid. Each hue has a designated job.
When you’re missing variety and contrast, the palette falls apart the moment you build a website or another piece of brand collateral with it.
And when there are no rules for what each colour does, designs get messy. People working with the brand reach for substitutes or add colours, and the palette never builds recognition over time.
Read more
How many colours should a brand have? I’ve answered that question in more detail and with the help of real-world examples.
What the research says about brand colours
Before we get into the steps, there are three things worth knowing about the theory behind what we just covered.
Colour meaning is only one part of the picture
Yes, colour carries meaning. It can even shape how people read a brand’s personality. Labrecque and Milne found that red brands were perceived as more exciting and blue ones as more competent.
Colour can also affect us physically, like a raised heart rate under red light, or behaviourally, like the blue lights installed in the Tokyo underground that reduced suicide attempts.
But a brand is complex, and colour psychology shouldn’t be the only deciding factor. You need to consider your positioning, category, competition, audience, and the image you want to create as a company, too.
The 80% number doesn’t hold up
You’ll read everywhere that colour increases brand recognition by 80%. If you trace that number back, there’s no verifiable study behind it.
Research on distinctive brand assets consistently shows that recognition from colour alone is weak. In most cases, it only works when the colour is used consistently combined with other brand assets.
Repetition beats meaning and builds loyalty
We’ve said colour works best paired with other brand elements. Here’s why repetition does the heavy lifting.
- Associative learning explains that when a colour consistently appears alongside your logo, product, and name, people learn to link the two, the same way Pavlov’s dogs learned to connect the ring of a bell with food. The colour becomes a shortcut back to the brand because you paired them together often enough.
- The mere exposure effect, something I’ve written about in my list of cognitive biases adds that the more often we see something, the more familiar and positive it starts to feel. This, in turn, helps build trust and loyalty with the brand over time.
Pick a defensible colour system and repeat it in the same combinations, everywhere, for years.
With all that in mind, let’s now look at the process I use in my client work.
Step 1: Assign every colour a job
Don’t choose a colour by what you like, but rather by the job it needs to do.
Almost every brand needs at least three colours, though four is more common once you add an accent hue:
- A brand colour. That’s the colour, or combination of colours, you want people to remember, recognise and link to your brand name.
- A light base. Pick one or more colours you can use for your surfaces and backgrounds, on your website, in your documents, and across your packaging. This could be an off-white or a very light version of your brand colour. Pure white works too, but it often feels sterile and misses the chance to hint at your brand colour.
- A dark contrast. That’s the colour your text is set in. It’s usually a near-black, because pure black on white can be harsh on the eyes on screens. A very dark grey, or a dark tone of your brand colour, reads more refined.
- An accent. Its job is to direct attention to buttons, links, highlights, or sale tags. It needs to contrast with everything above and should be used sparingly. It should also have enough contrast so a button is legible on light and dark backgrounds. For that reason, it’s not always practical to use your brand colour for it, although it’s possible.
Some brands need more colours, such as a secondary brand colour, or a functional set for categories or data visualisations.
But keep in mind that every colour you add multiplies the decisions you’ll have to make. Most small businesses don’t need that many to start with, and you can always add more once your business grows.
Step 2: Research your category before you choose
Your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It often sits next to its competitors, whether in your customers’ feeds, on the same shelf, or on the same search results page. So before choosing your brand colour, be sure to map the market.
Collect the visual identities of your 8–10 closest competitors. I usually take screenshots of their websites, logos, and packaging and lay them out in one document. That way, I can see the pattern and spot gaps.
Usually, categories are dominated by the same colours. Finance and tech drown in blue. Sustainability brands use a lot of sage green. Legal brands might use navy and burgundy.
That means you have a strategic decision to make. Do you break the pattern, or blend in deliberately?
Break the pattern
If everyone in your category uses blue, the best move is to avoid it. It gets you instant visual distinctiveness.
The break doesn’t have to be radical, though. A wellness brand might swap the expected sage for a soft sand tone that still signals calm while standing out from all the greens.
Yet sometimes a radical break works too. Lululemon, for example, sells wellness with a bold red logo.
When it comes to small businesses, I like to be courageous. When you can’t outspend the big players, you can at least “out-contrast” them.
Use the pattern deliberately
Keep in mind that category conventions exist for a reason, though. Sometimes signalling “we are a serious financial firm” matters more than standing out, especially in trust-heavy, conservative categories.
Breaking convention always carries the risk of costing credibility.
Step 3: Use colour psychology to support your brand personality
Before this point, you should know your brand personality—the characteristics and tone you want your brand to express. Colour psychology’s job is to support those traits. Hold your colour candidates up against their meaning to see if any contradict your personality.
A luxury watchmaker in neon yellow fights its own pricing, since yellow often signals affordability. But again, it’s always about context. If the brand wants to be seen as fresh and youthful, it might still work.
What each colour signals, and where it falls apart
Here’s a reference table of associations Western audiences have learned. Take them with a grain of salt.
| Colour | Learned associations | You'll see it in |
|---|---|---|
| Red | Energy, urgency, appetite, passion | Food, retail sales, entertainment |
| Orange | Friendliness, affordability, playfulness | E-commerce, fitness, kids' brands |
| Yellow | Optimism, attention, caution | Budget retail, food, logistics |
| Green | Nature, health, growth, money | Sustainability, finance, wellness |
| Blue | Trust, competence, calm | Tech, finance, healthcare, insurance |
| Purple | Luxury, creativity, spirituality | Beauty, premium confectionery |
| Pink | Softness, youth, romance | Beauty, fashion, food |
| Brown | Craft, earthiness, tradition | Coffee, crafts, organic goods |
| Black | Sophistication, authority, luxury | Fashion, premium anything |
| White/neutrals | Simplicity, cleanliness, minimalism | Health, tech, architecture |
Before you lean on those associations, keep these caveats in mind:
- The table shows learned conventions, not universal laws. Blue doesn’t automatically inspire trust in humans; it’s the result of decades of financial and tech companies using blue. Humans share broad evolutionary preferences for colours associated with nature, but the meanings of corporate colours are social conventions.
- Culture check, based on your market. If you sell in one cultural region, a quick sanity check is enough. If you sell across cultures, check your colours against your actual markets. White means purity in a Western wedding and mourning at a Japanese funeral; red is luck in China, bridal in India, and warning in a German lab. David McCandless’s colours-in-cultures infographic is a quick way to do this.
- Colours can have multiple associations. Red is associated with appetite and alarm. Yellow represents optimism and affordability. Black represents luxury and mourning. Meaning depends just as much on other design choices, such as the proportion and hue you use for each colour.
- The saturation and lightness of a colour might carry more personality than its hue. A dusty, muted red and a fire-engine red share a hue but almost nothing else. Muted and desaturated colours feel calm, premium, and grown-up. Bright and saturated colours feel energetic, affordable and loud.
What I’d actively skip are personality quizzes that map you to a palette, or this year’s Pantone colour, since both will make your brand look generic and dated pretty quickly.
Also be careful with AI colour generators. They’re all trained on the same associations and trends, and you don’t want your brand identity to look like anyone else’s.
AI can be most helpful when you feed it all the variables, like the feeling you want your brand to evoke, who you’re trying to appeal to, what the market looks like and what position you want to take in it, where the gaps are, …
Step 4: Build your brand colour palette as a system
Now it’s time to create the colour system we talked about in Step 1. This step is easier to show than to explain, so I’ll walk you through a real client project alongside the explanation.
Example: Office Flower Solutions, a rental service for artificial flowers
Office Flower Solutions rents out artificial bouquets to workplaces across Melbourne. The problem we identified was that fake flowers have a reputation problem. They’re often seen as tacky and outdated. Rather than elevating a space, they undercut it.
So the strategic call was to position the arrangements as the smarter choice and show that they can have all the style of fresh flowers with none of the drooping or maintenance.
Within six months of launch, the brand had landed clients including Microsoft, BCG, Porsche, Hyatt, and Mercedes-Benz.
Choose the brand colour first
The first step is always the primary brand colour, as everything else calibrates around it. Pick a colour you can commit to for decades. Your Step 2 category map tells you which colours are overused; your Step 3 filter tells you which you shouldn’t use. Don’t overthink your decision too much. Commitment beats perfection.
For Office Flower Solutions, we chose a clean, refined palette to let the arrangements take the spotlight rather than competing with them. That was the opposite instinct to most floral branding, which tends to lean on saturated colour, often pink, to signal ‘flowers.’
We wanted the brand to feel sophisticated enough for a Porsche showroom, without losing Ben’s personality, which is a bit cheeky, yet still professional. That’s what brought in a slightly British tone of voice, a friendly founder icon, and a few unexpected colours in the mix.
| Name | HEX | RGB | CMYK | Use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Petal White | fdfdf8 | 253, 253, 248 | 1, 1, 2, 0 | Light backgrounds or text |
| Soft Sage | f1f4e6 | 241, 244, 230 | 6, 3, 11, 0 | Light backgrounds |
| Olive Stone | dce3c1 | 220, 227, 193 | 15, 6, 27, 0 | Backgrounds or design elements |
| Deep Moss | 373c2a | 55, 60, 42 | 60, 42, 71, 62 | Brand anchor (logo, icons, headlines) |
| Charcoal Leaf | 23261b | 35, 38, 27 | 63, 47, 63, 75 | Text |
| Cornflower Haze | cddbff | 205, 219, 255 | 21, 11, 0, 0 | Lighter tint of the accent, used for background variation |
| Cornflower Blue | 839eff | 131, 158, 255 | 56, 36, 0, 0 | Accent for buttons and links |
| Sunflower | fbef5f | 251, 239, 95 | 5, 2, 77, 0 | Reserve accent, used sparingly |
Derive the neutrals from the brand colour
Instead of defaulting to pure white and pure black, tint your neutrals slightly with your brand colour or its contrasting hue. That way, the palette starts feeling cohesive and deliberate.
For Office Flower Solutions, that meant Soft Sage, Olive Stone, and Charcoal Leaf all have a trace of Deep Moss rather than sitting on a plain grey scale. Cornflower Haze adds a second background option derived from the accent colour.
Add the accent by contrast
The accent’s job is to be seen instantly. Contrast matters more than the hue itself. An accent works perfectly well in your primary brand colour, as long as you’re using it sparingly everywhere else.
What breaks an accent colour is bad contrast against light and dark backgrounds, or a colour that’s already used all over the page with nothing left to pop against.
On the Office Flower Solutions website, interface elements use Cornflower Blue.
Refer to colour harmonies for a well-balanced palette
If you want the theory behind why some combinations feel harmonious, the colour wheel gives you five reliable relationships:
- Complementary: two colours opposite each other on the wheel. Maximum contrast, ideal for brand-colour-plus-accent pairs.
- Split-complementary: a base colour plus the two neighbours of its opposite. Nearly as much contrast, easier to balance.
- Analogous: three to five neighbours on the wheel. Harmonious and calm, but low contrast, so your neutrals have to work harder.
- Triadic: three colours evenly spaced. Lively and balanced, trickier to keep from looking like a toy brand.
- Tetradic: two complementary pairs. Maximum variety, hardest to control. Usually one pair should clearly dominate.
Office Flower Solutions’ colour scheme loosely follows a split-complementary approach. Deep Moss and Cornflower Blue sit close to each other, while Sunflower falls almost exactly opposite the blue, which is partly why it works so well as the rare pop of contrast.
Tints, tones, and shades balance a colour palette
This might sound pretty colourful, but it doesn’t have to. You can use tints (hue + white) for lighter variants for backgrounds, tones (hue + grey) for muted, sophisticated in-betweens, and shades (hue + black) for depth in elements like typography. This gives you enough variation without your palette starting to look like a children’s party.
Office Flower Solutions’ greens work exactly this way. Soft Sage and Olive Stone are lighter tints of Deep Moss, Charcoal Leaf is a darker shade of it, and Cornflower Haze does the same for Cornflower Blue.
Set proportions for your colours
Another way to balance your palette is to set proportions. A good palette doesn’t use every colour in equal amounts. In a webinar, illustrator Greg Gunn mentioned the 60-30-10 rule: roughly 30% brand colour, 60% neutrals, and 10% accent.
But every brand is different, and there are no strict rules. What matters is that the brand colour gets enough exposure and the accent stays rare. A brand colour used on just 5% of your surfaces, but always in the same role, say a pattern of red lines, can be more recognisable than one splashed across 50% of them.
That’s what we do for Office Flower Solutions, too. Deep Moss barely covers any surface, but it’s consistently used in the logo, headlines and icons, which is what makes it recognisable over time.
Dropbox is a useful counter-example to study
Dropbox’s core identity is a strict blue-on-white system, but their brand guidelines allow an extended palette around it. That flexibility works because the core is rigid. Small businesses often copy the flexibility without the rigid core, and end up with neither recognition nor range.
Step 5: Test where your colour system breaks
Every palette looks good as a row of circles on a moodboard. Palettes fail in use. Before you commit, break-test yours:
- Contrast and accessibility: On screens, your text colour on your background colour must meet WCAG contrast ratios: 4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text. To be sure, check every text-background combination in a contrast checker, including text on the accent button. Roughly one in twelve men has some form of colour vision deficiency; it’s worth making sure they can read your website.
- Dark mode: Today, a large share of your audience will see your website, emails, and app icons on a dark background even when you didn’t design for it. Test your brand colour and accent on near-black. Many mid-tone brand colours turn muddy and carefully tinted neutrals might disappear. You don’t need a full second palette, but you should be aware of what happens and define at least a fallback.
- Print and screen: Brand colours live in different contexts, such as on a backlit screen (RGB profile) and on paper (CMYK or Pantone profile). Some vivid screen colours are physically unprintable. If print matters to your business—if you need menus, packaging, or signage—get a proof before falling in love with a colour. Define your palette in HEX/RGB for screen and CMYK, ideally with a Pantone reference for critical applications, for print, from day one.
- Context: Place the palette on the items where it will actually live, like your website header, a social post, an invoice, a shopfront if you have one. With realistic mockups, you can test these things fast.
Step 6: Document your colour palette and stick to it
The final step determines whether any of the above steps were worth it. The best colour palette won’t work if it’s not documented and applied as intended.
Document the colour system
For a small business, one page might be enough. Document each colour with its role; its HEX, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone values if needed; the approved text-background combinations; the proportions these colours should be used in as well as a few examples of what not to do.
This page belongs in your brand guidelines. If you work with any external designer, printer, or social media freelancer, it pays for itself the first week. The goal is the same colours on every brand touchpoint.
Stick to it
Then leave it alone. The recognition you’re building compounds with time, and every “refresh” resets the clock. The urge to fiddle usually peaks around month six, when you’re bored of your palette. Your audience isn’t bored. They’re just beginning to notice.
Change it only when you have a legitimate reason
That’s when
- your strategy genuinely changed (new positioning, new market),
- your palette has a functional failure you can’t patch (accessibility, print),
- or you’ve merged or been acquired.
“We saw a nicer palette on Pinterest” is not on the list.
Common mistakes when choosing brand colours
Make sure to avoid the most common colour mistakes I see with small businesses. Each maps to a step above, so you know how to fix it:
- Picking colours by personal taste alone. You love lavender, so you build your whole identity around it, without checking whether lavender says anything about your business and its market. (Steps 1–3)
- Ignoring your audience. The same eco-conscious buyer might want calm, earthy tones for a skincare brand, but feels drawn to something bold and vibrant for an entertainment brand. Your personality filter (Step 3) only works if you know who you’re filtering it for and what they want out of your brand.
- Skipping the competitor research. If every accountant in your area uses navy, picking navy too won’t help you get noticed. (Step 2)
- Treating colour psychology as a strategy instead of a filter. You pick blue because blue signals trust—but the muted navy a law firm needs and the saturated cobalt startup might choose have completely different associations (Step 3)
- Ignoring cultural context. The white you picked for its calm, minimal feel reads as mourning in some Asian markets. It’s worth researching other markets before that colour choice shows up across your packaging and marketing. (Step 3)
- Skipping neutrals, or adding too many colours. A palette with five bold colours and no neutral to balance them looks chaotic and won’t work in the real world. (Step 1, 4)
- Failing contrast. Light grey text on a white background might look fine to you, but the WHO estimates that at least 2.2 billion people globally live with some form of vision impairment—and low-contrast text is the kind of barrier that shuts many of them out. (Step 5)
- Never testing in print. A vivid screen colour can turn muddy the moment it’s printed. So get a proof before you commit to a colour. (Step 5)
- Constantly refreshing your palette. Every refresh resets the recognition you’ve spent years building. Your customers were just starting to remember the old one. (Step 6)
Colour tools I recommend
This is a short list, because tools are the least important part of this process:
- Coolors: a playful, interactive palette generator with a contrast checker and palette visualiser built in. (Affiliate link.)
- Colour Hunt: a curated collection of palettes shared by designers, which can be useful for inspiration.
- Adobe Color: useful for building harmonies on the colour wheel, or extracting a palette from an image.
None of these replaces Steps 1–3. Generators are great at producing harmonious palettes, but they don’t know your brand strategy or your customers.
Frequent questions about brand colours
How many colours should a brand have?
Most brands need three to five: a brand colour, a light neutral, a dark neutral, and often an accent. Fewer than that and the system breaks under real use; more, and every addition multiplies your decisions. I go through real-world examples in How many colours should a brand have?
Does colour psychology matter at all?
Colour meaning matters, but it should only ever check your choice, never drive it. Your brand colour should evoke the right feeling for your brand’s personality. Recognition comes from distinctiveness in your category and consistent use over time, not from meaning alone.
Can I change my brand colours later?
Yes, but every change resets some of the recognition you’ve built. It’s worth it when your strategy or market genuinely shifts, or when the palette fails on accessibility or in print. Getting bored of your colours isn’t a good enough reason; your customers are usually just starting to recognise them.
Should I follow colour trends?
No. A colour chosen because it’s trendy is almost certainly going to feel dated in a few years and when other companies choose it, too, it also won’t stand out. What builds recognition is consistency over years and that’s best done with a colour that is based in your research, not trends.
Where to go from here
A colour palette is one decision inside a bigger system. It should follow from your brand strategy and work alongside your typography and other distinctive assets. It shouldn’t stand on its own.
If you’d rather have this whole system built than build it yourself, this is what I do. I develop strategy, design, and copy together, as one integrated service, in English and German, for a small number of clients per year. Tell me about your business, and I’ll be honest about whether I’d be the right fit.
