What Color Are You?

What color are you? I'm talking about your brand color. It's something that can be easily overlooked, but shouldn't be. For years, marketing professionals have applied their knowledge of the psychological effect of colors when branding for large corporations. Who doesn't know about the golden arches or Big Blue? However, I must admit that I associated the orange ball with "I-N-G", long before I even knew what ING was (just in case you still don't know, ING provides financial services).

Carefully selecting your color when branding is important whether you're branding a company, product, service, or yourself (you don't have to be a celebrity to have a personal brand). Lots of research has been conducted and shows a strong relationship between color and marketing. Research from CCICOLOR Institute for Color Research, reveals that people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone.

Color theorists have more extensive descriptions of value judgements and color, but here's my Cliffsnotes version.

WHITE – purity, peace, contentment
BLACK – boldness, seriousness, elegance
Gray or Silver – high tech, authority, practicality
GOLD – wealth, prosperity, happiness
BLUE – sanctuary, faithfulness, confidence.
RED – warmth, power, excitement
YELLOW – spiritual, happiness, warmth
GREEN – freedom, healing, tranquility
BROWN – richness, politeness, helpfulness
ORANGE – contentment, pleasure,
PINK – gentleness, romance, well being
PURPLE – royalty, spirituality, dignity

In my next post, I'll look what colors have to say about your website.

Exactly Who Are You Marketing To?

It’s been said that nobody can toot your horn better than you. If you’re investing time and money in a venture that requires exposure, such as operating a business, launching a product or service, promoting a book or even brokering a radio show, then you are probably all too familiar with this axiom. 

In an ideal world, your marketing and/or advertising needs would be turned over to a team of creative professionals, dedicated to your campaign’s success.  But alas, this is the real world, so the job of building awareness is just one of the many hats that we wear. We need people to know that we exist.  We need them to know what we do, how well we do it, and why they should do business with us (or read our book, or listen to our radio show). So you launch a marketing campaign.  

Here’s where things can get a little tricky. You work hard designing all the requisite collateral; email, sales brochures and other print products,  PowerPoint presentations, web content, product data sheets and so forth. You're making sales calls, you’ve even made a few presentations, but sales remain elusive.

So what’s the problem?  Your marketing materials contain the most impressive facts about your venture:  the numerous awards…the storied history of the business…the enviable sales volume…the fact that you were the first to offer a premium brand or that the mayor shops at your store.  There’s no question about it, you have lots to boast about.  But perhaps that’s exactly the problem.  Simply put, you’re doing a great job of communicating why you’re important, but you’re not communicating why you’re important to your target.

If you’re going to spend the time and money to do your own marketing, then it’s imperative that you first conduct market research.  Without the proper insight of your customer base, it’s impossible to communicate value to that target—not your value, but what the target deems valuable.  For some it’s cost.  For others, it’s time, or perhaps it’s something else still.  But you’ll have to first gather information about your market.. Learn all you can about your target market (and your competition for that matter).  You should know who, what, when, where and most importantly why, before you launch your campaign.  It’ll be well worth your time to spend a few hours at the library or online gathering this data, conducting a few surveys and making calls.  Once you’re armed with this information, you’ll then be able to develop an effective marketing campaign.