Image courtesy of https://www.logomaker.com/

I thought as it’s Blue Monday, I’d do a quick post on what blue means to people and logo colour theory.

We all make associations, snap decisions and form immediate impressions of colours.  Think about if you saw a flashing red light on a machine.  Would your first thought be, “Danger / Warning / Run!” or “Hey, I’m in perfectly good working order, nothing to see here….” ?

Colours represent meaning to us, sometimes whether we are consciously aware of those meanings or not.

So what does Blue mean to people when it comes to branding?

For MySalesAcademy and Contemsa, we’ve brought both brands under the same colour of blue:

We chose that colour because of the educational element to MySalesAcademy – to convey that we were a centre for educating, professional and a fresh approach.  If we’d have chosen a logo that had red, pink, green and purple all in the same logo, maybe those ideas of ‘education, professionalism and fresh approach’ wouldn’t be conveyed in the same way.

Here’s what the internet thinks about the colour blue for branding and logos:

Blue stands for:

Calm, stable, trust, smart (Source)

Dependable, strength (Source)

Famous ‘blue’ brands

And that’s the reason why so many brands have chosen blue to be their core business colour across branding and logos, here are just a few – notice anything in common about these brands?

• Dell
• IBM
• Ford
• Intel
• General Motors
• Oral-B
• PayPal
• Skype
• Barclays
• Royal Bank of Scotland
• TSB
• Nationwide
• Natwest
• Metro Bank
• Halifax
• The Co-operative Bank

The first observation is that many of them are financial services companies.  Banks want to be trusted – if you don’t trust a bank, you don’t put your money with them, so they need to build a brand image that represents credibility and trust – for both consumer bankers and also large corporate organisations.

There are also a few large corporate IT players in that list – again, if a company is selling products and services worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, then the impression they want to portray is one of trust; ‘we can handle your project, Mr Customer’.

A simpler theory – our favourite colour

Interestingly, blue appears to be the favourite colour by a long way for both men and women:

57% of men said blue was their favourite colour, while blue was the preferred choice for 35% of women. (Source)

Is Blue Really Royal?

Perhaps the reason we trust blue so much is its royal heritage.  The shade (or name) Royal Blue was allegedly created for a dress for Queen Charlotte (Source).

And, blue is the key colour in the United Kingdom and United States’ flags – so it’s a colour we are seeing regularly in our day to day lives in fairly prominent positions (look at the colour branding on the Royal Family’s website for instance: https://www.royal.uk/home-royal-family).

So it’s no wonder that we come to associate the colour with a sense of organisation, being official and professional and dependable.