Brand Color Psychology: What the Research Supports and What It Doesn't

Search for logo colors and you will find the chart within seconds: red is energy and appetite, blue is trust, green is nature, yellow is optimism, purple is luxury. It is neat, it is everywhere, and most of it is folklore presented as science. Look along a high street, or through a few rounds of On Brand, and you will see plenty of blue banks and red fast-food chains, so something is going on. The interesting question is what.

Here is what the research does and doesn't support.

The best-supported idea is not that a color causes a feeling, but that people judge whether a color fits a brand.

In 2012 Lauren Labrecque and George Milne ran four studies on color and brand personality, using the five dimensions the marketing researcher Jennifer Aaker had defined in 1997: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. Their paper's title sums up two of the findings, "Exciting red and competent blue". They also found that hue was only part of it: saturation and lightness shifted the impression as well, so a deep, muted blue and a bright, vivid one say different things (Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science).

Paul Bottomley and John Doyle came at it from the product side in 2006. In their experiments, people rated a logo's color as more appropriate when it matched the kind of product: functional products, bought for what they do, suited what the authors called functional colors, and products bought for pleasure or social image suited sensory-social ones (Marketing Theory, 2006).

Neither study says red sells burgers. They say people carry expectations about which colors suit which kinds of brand, and that a mismatch is noticed.

Why are some colors liked more than others at all? Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss proposed an answer in 2010, the ecological valence theory: people like a color roughly as much as they like the things they associate with it. Blues, the colors of clear sky and clean water, are widely liked; dark yellows and browns, the colors of rotting food and waste, are widely disliked. Their measured preferences matched people's feelings about the objects closely (PNAS, 2010).

That fits the logo counts. When Labrecque and Milne went through the logos of 281 leading brands in a 2013 paper, blue appeared in 48 percent of them and red in 31, while pink and brown appeared in 2 percent each. Blue is liked, safe and, for that very reason, crowded.

A crowded color is hard to own. The colors most tied to a single company, a purple chocolate wrapper, a magenta phone network, a robin's-egg jewelry box, are rarely the blue or red that everyone else in their market uses. Distinctiveness is part of why those companies could defend their colors in court, as the colors companies own describes.

The most famous color finding came from sport. In 2005 Russell Hill and Robert Barton looked at four combat sports at the 2004 Athens Olympics, where each fighter was randomly assigned red or blue, and found that red won more often, especially in closely matched bouts (Nature, 2005).

Part of the effect may have been in the officials' eyes. In 2008 Norbert Hagemann and colleagues showed taekwondo referees the same bouts twice, once as filmed and once with the fighters' colors digitally swapped. The fighter in red scored about 13 percent more points on average, whoever they were (Psychological Science, 2008). Since then, scoring rules have changed in several of these sports, and a later meta-analysis found little evidence that the red advantage still matters at the elite level.

So red can matter, in a specific setting with human judges, and less than the headlines said.

• "Red makes you hungry." There is no good evidence that red raises appetite. One of the better-known experiments found the opposite: in 2012 Oliver Genschow and colleagues reported that people ate fewer pretzels from red plates and drank less from cups with red labels than blue ones (Appetite, 2012). Later attempts to repeat even that result have been mixed. Fast-food chains may favor red and yellow, but that is a choice, not proof of a reflex.
• "Pink calms people down." In the late 1970s a shade later called Baker-Miller pink was claimed to reduce aggression, and some jails painted cells with it. When Genschow and colleagues tested it properly, randomly assigning prisoners in Switzerland to pink or plain cells, aggression fell over three days in both and never differed between them (Baker-Miller pink).
• "Color raises brand recognition by up to 80 percent." This figure is quoted everywhere and pinned on research at Loyola University. When Eddy Hagen traced it back in 2019, the trail ended at a printer maker's leaflet, and the Loyola work it names, by Ellen Hoadley in 1990, was about color in charts and tables, not brands.
• "62 to 90 percent of snap judgments are based on color alone." Another figure that turns up everywhere, usually credited to a 2006 article in Management Decision that was a review of other work, not a new experiment. Treat it with caution.
• "Red lowers test scores." A 2007 study by Andrew Elliot and colleagues reported that seeing red before a test hurt performance. Larger replications did not find it, and a 2020 meta-analysis by Timo Gnambs concluded there was no good evidence for the effect once publication bias was accounted for.

The chart is simple, plausible and useful to anyone selling color advice. It also mixes up two different things. Color associations are real, but they are learned, and they vary by culture and context: white is for weddings in much of the West and for mourning in parts of East Asia, and green means one thing on a salad bag and another on a bank statement. A universal effect, the same color doing the same thing to everyone, is a much bigger claim, and that is the part the evidence keeps failing to support.

Strip the myths away and three things are left that the evidence and the history of branding both support:

1. Fit. Choose a color whose associations suit what the brand wants to say and what it sells.
2. Distinctiveness. Choose a color the category is not already full of, or a shade of a common color that is clearly yours.
3. Consistency. Use it the same way everywhere for years, because a color only comes to mean a company once people have seen it mean that company many times.

The third is what On Brand tests. A brand color is not powerful because of its wavelength; it is powerful because you have seen it thousands of times. Which is also why it is surprising how little of it you can rebuild from memory, a puzzle why we misremember brand colors takes apart. Next time you play, try this: before you move a slider, ask whether you actually remember the brand's color, or are just assuming the color its industry usually wears.