The Role of Colors in Advertising

It’s for a long time that advertising became an indispensable part of our lives and took long roots to our subconsciousness. Its destination is evident: to provoke people to fulfill a certain action, by influencing the subconsciousness – right in the part of the decision-making: if to buy some goods and services or not. However, not all ads are created with this exact and effective aim of impacting people, and there are a lot of them, which are completely ineffective.

To achieve its principal aim – I mean, to gain interest and catch the consumers’ eye – it has to harmoniously combine the easiness, the form singularity, and the fortunate text-and-image junction. In other words, an advertisement has to be lively, brief and memorizable.

The most effective way to achieve the desired result is hidden in colors, which are correctly used in advertising. The colored ad (in contrast to the black-and-white one) makes a deeper impact on perception; it makes the given advantages of products and services more evident and persuasive; it encourages and favors that the advertised goods are well-recognized; and, thanks to the content which is as symbolized as possible, at long last, it can easily fathom someone’s subconsciousness.

So far as it goes about making up an effective ad, the objective would be the choosing an optimal color palette, whereas the right color layout can significantly increase the chances of the ad and make it really noticeable and memorizable for consumers. But what can be named the correct color palette with certainty? Well, first, that is such combination of colors, which wouldn’t irritate consumers. Because, you know, otherwise, a prospective spectator is likely to avoid viewing such ad as quickly as possible. Second, it’s necessary to keep in mind that the color has, nevertheless, but to be attractive for people. And it’s possible to reach such chef d’oeuvre just playing on contrasts (like even with white and black contrasts, for example).

There is certain dependence between the color solution in advertising and natural perception of the human eye – some separately taken colors, even in their combinations with each other, express these or those clichés and attract the corresponding feelings. As an example, yellow-red tones encourage excitement and so-called «electrification». Blue and gray palette, on the contrary, makes feel calm.  Black or gray are possessed of the sense of refinement and high level of culture.

From the angle of psychological effectiveness and impact on consumers, most successful color combinations lay between yellow, turquoise, blue-purple and ruby. By this, it’s strongly recommended to use no more that two different colors in advertising. Of course, this restriction doesn’t exclude multiple variations and relative tones of these colors; moreover, such relationship brings a feeling of color consistency and doesn’t irritate the eye.

Then, making up advertisements and banners, it’s very important to keep in mind not only how these colors themselves influence the state of human mind, but also – how well they harmonize with each other in the text. So, it’s commonly proven that the text is read most easily, when it’s written by blue on the white ground. Then, it’s considered to be not very reasonable to use white on the brown ground. The same thing concerns white or yellow upon red. You can try and imagine how such mixtures are hardly perceived by the human eye.

Colors influence not only the eyesight, but other sense bodies as well: so we can taste the «sweet pink color», hear the «loudy-shouty» red, are palpably aware of the «airy white», or smell the «freshness of the green».

 What else is important in employing colors in advertising – you’d better pay attention to cultural and national peculiarities in perception of this or that color as well. In different cultures even the basic colors are often treated in different ways. So, as an example, if in the USA yellow is close to the notion of prosperity, in Syria this color symbolizes the death; in the same range, blue in the American treatment means belief in future, it means the hope, but in China at the same time it is inseparably linked with mourning. So, summarizing, it’s obviously necessary to find an optimal compromise settlement in the question of color palette, when it goes about promotion in different geographical regions, and it’s necessary to choose those colors which would be perceived in the proper way by people and which could involve as a target as many geographical regions as possible.

Possessing the most perfect color-perceiving system, the human being has been developing diverse ways of using colors for personal and business needs. And this craft concerns with the same importance the industries of entertainment. And we see, as a result: the advertisement becomes more and more effective, in condition it’s used correctly in the sense of a certain color palette, which will probably become a color palette of the well-known brand. Some day.