To set your business apart from the competition, it’s important to have unique, eye-catching packaging. Your choice of colors has a massive impact on your packaging’s overall impression. It’s one of the best ways to refine and enhance your image and branding—and you can send clever, subliminal messages to your customers that encourage them to buy your product. Before you select the color palette for your packaging, check out these tips for using color in product packaging. They’ll ensure you make the best choice in color, so you can accurately represent your brand identity and attract new, curious customers to your business.
Before You Choose
When you’re picking out colors for your packaging, there’s a few, critical things you should keep in mind. Your target demographic should influence the type of colors you select. Understanding their needs and motivation, along with their age, gender, economic status, education, and more, will help you pick out colors they can identify with. Yellow, for example, represents youthfulness, happiness, and energy, making it the perfect color for marketing to young, optimistic people. Red, on the other hand, is motivated and fiery — perfect for high-energy, sporty individuals, or ambitious businesspeople.
Marketing to your customers is essential, but so is accurately portraying your brand and the product it’s selling. Your branding is always important. When you’re picking out colors for your packaging, you should choose ones that complement your company’s logo and traditional imagery. The product is an essential part of the packaging, too. You can use colors to reflect a product’s purpose. Do you want people to think of your product as something that’s comforting or fun? Does it have a sophisticated design, or one that’s simple and down-to-earth? Sleek, neutral colors, such as black, white, and grey, can give your product an air of modernity, while muted, earthy colors such as brown and blue are relaxing. You don’t want your product to blend in on the shelves. To stand out, try choosing colors that are different from the competition. For example, if all the other products incorporate dull, muted shades, pick out something bright and bold instead.
Picking out the right color isn’t always easy. By making use of product packaging comps and mockups, you try out multiple color combinations before finalizing your design.
Understanding Color Psychology
Another tip for using color in product packaging is to understand how the psychology of color works. Colors affect human behavior and emotion in unique ways, and can influence how a customer will perceive and react to your product’s packaging. Let’s look at what some of the most popular colors represent.
Blue
Blue represents tranquility, love, loyalty, security, trust, and intelligence.
Red
Red represents love, energy, power, strength, passion, and heat.
Brown
Brown represents friendliness, earth, outdoors, longevity, and conservativeness.
Green
Green represents money, growth, fertility, freshness, and healing.
Pink
Pink represents happiness, femininity, compassion, sweetness, and playfulness.
Purple
Purple represents royalty, nobility, spirituality, luxury, and ambition.
Yellow
Yellow represents brightness, energy, creativity, intellect, and happiness.
Black
Black represents protection, classiness, and formality.
Gray
Gray represents security, reliability, intelligence, and solidity.
White
White represents goodness, innocence, purity, freshness, and cleanliness.
When there are endless color combinations, how do you choose? Virtual Packaging’s product packaging comps and mockups will give you a clearer idea of what your product looks like with different colors, shapes, sizes, materials, and more, making it easier to choose the perfect fit.
