What's the Color of Your Personal Brand?

Adapted from "True Colors: Using Color to Build Your Brand," a previous MarketingProfs article (August 2004) by William Arruda.

As a marketer, you are likely aware of the psychological impact of color. Color is one tool in our branding toolbox to help express brand attributes and create emotional connections with constituencies. But color is not just for large corporations or products on the grocery-store shelf; it's an important aspect of your personal brand as well.

We all have opinions about color. We select colors for our clothes and the walls of our house. But this article is not about choosing colors to highlight your skin tone or create a certain aesthetic in your home. It's about choosing colors reflective of your unique promise of value that you can use consistently in your career-marketing tools.

To get in the right mindset for selecting a color (or colors) for your brand, let's look at how companies use color.

When you hear "Big Blue," what company comes to mind? IBM, of course.

IBM maximizes its unique relationship with the color blue. It's the primary color on the corporate website and is used in all presentations, on marketing materials, on signage, and in the names of many of its products and programs: Blue Gene, Deep Blue, and Extreme Blue—just to name a few. Although blue is the most common logo color for American corporations, it's probably more often associated with IBM than with any other brand.

→ end article preview
Read the Full Article