Ministry Branding – Color Palette
In today’s article we are going to talk about the importance of color in your ministry branding. Color is often times an underrated element in any brand development process. At Reliant, we most often see colors chosen based on personal preference, but color can have a much more significant affect on consumer behavior if we put thought based on research into our color decisions. We know that colors have a psychological affect on people, and as ministries trying to grow and make the largest Kingdom impact that we can, we believe it’s wise that you use color to your ministries advantage in your brand development and marketing. Now, this post is not going to go into detail on the psychology of color. There are plenty of resources on color theory, simply search “color theory” on Google and you’ll get more information than you could ever consumer. Today I simply want to share the importance of color, and the importance of choosing the right colors in your ministry brand development process.
Color Consistency
Your ministry will never be able to lay claim to any color or set of colors exclusively, but you can consistently associate your brand with a color or colors. In fact, color is often times the one thing that remains when companies and ministries go through a re-brand. The logo mark and typography choices might change or update every 2-5 years, but often times color associations with a particular brand are so entrenched in consumer minds that to change color palette would be detrimental to the brand. Can you imagine Coca Cola changing the color associated with that brand… red, to something like yellow or even a slight change on the color wheel to orange? That would harm the association people have with the Coca Cola brand. There has to be consistency in your brand color choice and usage. If you’ll recall, at the base level brands are made up of words and visuals. Color is an incredibly important piece to the visual aspects of your brand. Our minds remember and associate things with color before they make associations with shape. So, creating an association to a color or colors in your brand will play an important role in helping your supporters remember your ministry brand.
Creating Brand Experience with Color
Let’s look at a few examples of color associations in successful brands. UPS has a strong association with the color brown. The Livestrong brand and McDonald’s both have strong associations with the color yellow. When I say Facebook, the color that instantly comes to mind is blue, right? John Deere, Starbuck’s, and Spotify all have one common color association, green. Again, I’m not going to go into the why these brands chose to associate themselves with these colors from a psychological perspective, the important thing is that they all use the colors they’ve associated with themselves on a consistent basis. This ultimately makes is easier for their target audiences to remember their brands. It is crucial that when we use the colors we associate our ministry brands with that we do so in a consistent manner. Last week I posted an article about logo marks, and at the end of that article I spoke about the importance of brand experience. Consumers or supporters do not purchase or donate because you have a great logo or because you’ve used the right colors. They will choose your ministry, and they will keep choosing to invest in your ministry because of the experience they have with your brand. Consistency in our color usage will allow us to create a brand experience for our target audience that is comfortable and recognizable. As humans, we tend to not like change. We enjoy comfort. We enjoy things that we recognize and know closely. A correct and consistent use of color will help create a brand experience that is recognizable, comfortable and easy to remember. Focus on creating a great brand experience for your supporters, and use a consistent use of color in your brand as a tool to that end.
The Psychology of Color
If you’d like to learn more about the psychology of color, HERE is a great article by Nick Kolenda. Additionally, Canva has put together an incredible deep dive into the psychology of color in this article HERE. Both of these articles explore the psychology of color in a much deeper way than we have today.
HERE is a great article by Hubspot on how NOT to use color in your web design. Thanks for reading!
