In today's highly competitive market, a solid brand strategy is absolutely essential for achieving success. While there are plenty of options out there for brand design, 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 client's business goals, engages their target audience, and results in laser-focused branding on 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 all about how everyone can enjoy their cookies! 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 shelve 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 color strategy was the newly consolidated Teselta, a heavy machinery supplier in the construction and agricultural sector. 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 stars 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 their 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 got inspired by the motion graphics industry, using bright RGB orange, purple and green colors. The result is unique and inescapable from 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 appealing to the eye and brands that deliver on your business purpose and speak 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.
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 invest in results, and the 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 and six continents to work together in designing and implementing communications strategies for all key stakeholders. Today, we proudly manage over 15 marketing communications departments representing more than $1B in annual sales, and 70% are exporting to international markets.
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