The Color Facet of Brand Image: Identifying Color-Brand Personality Match

This paper establishes a quantitative relationship between color space and consumers’ brand perceptions and provides a straightforward business application. Prior research shows that the color of a brand affects its brand perception. However, the research on tailoring color analytics to specific branding needs is limited and focuses on either specific colors or specific brand elements. Using 3936 human-made collages on brand perception and corresponding ratings of 15 brand personality features, I capture the non-linear relationship between person’s color and brand perceptions. I further show the business application of this mapping – generation of a color palette that corresponds to a company’s desired brand personality. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it enriches color analytics and branding literature by explicitly showing if, to what extent and how brand personality characteristics can be communicated through a certain color or set of colors. Secondly, it equips marketing and design teams with a benchmark on which color palette is suitable for the brand image and, thus, can be used as core colors in brand guide- lines.