by Jonathan Munk

In creating your logo and brand identity, never overlook the importance of choosing the right color. When a customer looks at a logo, his/her mind goes through a sequence of visual perception. The brain first reads shape, then color, then content. So theoretically, the color in your logo is more recognized and potentially more powerful than the company name or tagline.

In terms of branding, the ultimate goal for any business owner should be to own a color, that is, to brand your company so that whenever a person sees a particular hue, they think of your company. Owning a color means facilitating recognition and building brand equity.

This concept is nothing new. Tractor makers have been doing it since the machines began dotting the landscape. The blue tractors were Fords, orange were Kubota, Red were International, green with yellow wheels were John Deer, and so on. The colors made it easy to distinguish one brand of tractor from another in an instant.

Companies today are attempting the same thing. Consider the color brown. Almost without thinking, UPS comes to mind. Kurt Kuehn, Senior Vice President of worldwide sales & marketing at UPS, knows how important brown is to the company’s identity.

After doing months of market research on people’s perception about them, Kuehn said in a speech in 2004, “We found that UPS was strongly identified with the color brown…brown could be a bridge to associate new attributes like agile, worldly, business savvy and forward-thinking.”

And their new campaign was born. “What Can Brown Do For You?”

When your color is strong enough to use it in your tagline, you know you’ve got it made in the shade.

Owning a color takes time, and in reality, few businesses are able to do it on a global scale. But small businesses can still own a color within their market if owners choose the right one for their logo and stick with it.