Marketing-Focused Brand Strategy: Color

In today's highly competitive market, a solid brand strategy is essential for achieving success. While there are numerous options available for brand design, ranging from freelance to boutique studios, standing out requires careful planning and execution. As marketing professionals, our expertise lies in crafting a roadmap that aligns with our clients' business goals, engages their target audience, and drives laser-focused branding that leads to marketing success.

In this article series, we'll be exploring the role of color in creating a sound brand strategy.

Color Strategy

While it may sound like a simple decision, color is one of the most important aspects of a brand. Especially when you visualize your brand against your competitors in a setting where you’re all grouped, such as a trade show, they reflect more of your brand story than you may imagine. Let’s take Tasty Smart, for example. These gluten-free cookies are crispy and delicious and will compete against many other gluten-free products on the shelf. When you look at the competitors, they all use a similar color scheme: many white and pastel colors. It has become a standard in the gluten-free industry.

But how does it help Tasty Smart convey its brand message: you don’t have to sacrifice flavor to eat healthy? The brand strategy for Tasty Smart is centered on making everyone's cookies enjoyable. If you focus your product on the 1% of the population (celiac and gluten-intolerant people), your brand potential gets lost, especially when anyone can eat a gluten-free snack! Along with a shelf position strategy, we chose a saturated color palette that mimics the packaging on the sugary aisle. It’s a way of saying: we’re gluten-free but taste like any other brand. Ultimately, gluten-intolerant people wish to enjoy yummy cookies like everyone else. Luckily for them, Tasty Smart is there to save the day!

Another brand that leveraged a well-thought-out color strategy was the newly consolidated Teselta, a supplier of heavy machinery to the construction and agricultural sectors. Looking at their competitors, it’s almost as if they all agreed to sing a binary set of colors in unison: black and yellow. It has become so standard that it's cliché. You can imagine, in the trade show setting mentioned earlier, you can barely distinguish where the stars are and where each brand begins. When creating the brand for Teselta, we immediately knew we had to move away from those colors. One of the biggest global companies, United Rentals, had chosen the color blue for its brand. Coincidence? We don’t think so. That’s when the color strategy kicks in. Our advice? Get inspiration from another industry.

Forget about the so-called meanings of colors. Color is so abstract and subjective that no color has a single meaning. It’s about context. Black can mean death, but it can also mean elegance and sophistication. Yellow can indicate joy and alertness, but also sickness and toxicity. It all boils down to the surrounding elements, the voice, and the color used. In the case of Teselta, we drew inspiration from the motion graphics industry, utilizing bright colors such as orange, purple, and green. The result is unique and inescapable to the eyes in a competitive environment. A highly memorable palette, not because of the meaning of each color but because of the way they are presented and how they contrast with the machines they sell.

At dpBrands, we build the next generation of brands. Under our marketing-focused approach, we can design brands that are visually appealing and deliver on your business purpose, speaking to the right audiences. If you need help with your brand strategy, evolution, or management, contact us to learn what our trust advisors can do.

*This blog post was written by Pedro Medina Leandry, Managing Partner & Lead Creative Advisor at DuartePino. 

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ABOUT US

DuartePino is a management outsourcing firm that combines in-depth customer knowledge with practical expertise in marketing, communications, brand management, and overall business strategies to help clients create sustainable business growth. Our single-source accountability comprises a unified network of Trusted Advisors with years of combined experience in their respective industries. As a result, we can provide your organization with a fresh perspective, proven processes that deliver results, and the necessary martech tools for successful execution.

We have one primary purpose: to help Hispanic-led companies connect with growth opportunities. We do this by intentionally building relationships of trust, internally and externally, through reliability, competence, and integrity. As members of the Worldcom network, we also have quick and unfettered access to the resources of more than 80 global partners in 50 countries across six continents, enabling us to work together in designing and implementing effective communications strategies for all key stakeholders. Today, we proudly manage over 15 marketing communications departments representing more than $1 billion in annual sales, and 70% of these departments export to international markets.