Colors are fun. Sometimes. They are one of my most enjoyable parts of building a new brand identity, and if applied correctly they can be a huge asset. If you are changing your color or trying to choose one, here are the two things you need to be thinking about.

1. Is it emotionally on brand?

Colors have emotional connotations. In our Western Culture, certain colors mean certain things. The emotional color wheel helps drive us to choose, objectively, which colors best align with what we want a brand to be know for. It helps remove the subjectivity of personal tastes, especially SEC Football allegiances (like the beautiful big orange of Tennessee).

2. Is it competitive?

It is near impossible to "own" a color, unless you are Coca-Cola. But if you do have direct competition, what colors are they know for? How can you leverage color to radically differentiate from them? Kubota tractors uses orange solely because it is the opposite of John Deere green. Orange is a bizarre color to be synonymous with agriculture and farming but it's been a great asset for the brand. Sometimes a competitive color can trump emotional reasoning for mere purposes of being distinct.

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