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Red Color in Branding

Brands spend a considerable time on deciding on the best colors palettes and logos for their brands. The reason? Choosing the wrong one could impact how consumers perceive your brand/product. Colors that fall under the warm category are used to evoke attention, energy, and warmth.

The red color is shown to increase blood pressure and heart rate if you talk about this color’s physiological impact. It gives energy and stimulates appetite, which makes it the number one choice for food-related products and services.

Meaning of Red Color Branding in Business

Positive Implications:

  • Powerful
  • Energetic
  • Strong
  • Motivating
  • Warm
  • Exciting
  • Driven
  • Fast
  • Passionate
  • Spontaneous

Negative Implications:

  • Rebellious
  • Violent
  • Ruthless
  • Fearful
  • Aggressive
  • Dominating
  • Over-bearing
  • Intolerant

It is important to note that there are variations of the color red as well and as a brand, you should know what the different variations of red color imply:

•    Bright Red stands for economical, energetic, and exciting.

•    Dark Red represents command, luxurious, and professional.

•    Crimson means determined, powerful, and sensual.

•    Maroon stands for courageous, controlled, and strong.

•    Burgundy means serious, subtle, and sophisticated.

Red Branding

Let’s take a look at red color in branding:

Makes you Hungry:

Coca-Cola, Red Lobster. All red. Red branding whets your appetite and is the most common color used by food-related companies. It stimulates appetite, especially when paired with yellow. Take the example of McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King, Wendy’s, Denny’s, etc. The idea behind using this color is that it not only grabs your attention right away it communicates speed and rapidness. Red is one of the best colors to use in boards and signage because it can be seen and recognized from far away nothing like white or blue that has greater chances of merging with the clouds and the sky.

burger king fast food restaurant red branding

•    Implies Strength:

Red branding is used for masculine products as well. The color is linked with our primal and survival instincts. It oozes out a bold and strong masculine vibe. Brands such as Diesel, Canon, and Nintendo are popular examples that use red to denote masculine energy.

diesel logo red branding

•    Represents Sensual and Sexy Products:

As stated earlier, the color draws your attention to it like a moth to a flame. It is a popular color to convey love, passion, heart, kisses, and Valentine’s Day as well. So, it also communicates sensuality and lust. Essie, Ferrari, and Virgin are a few examples of red product logos.

virgin red branding in logo

Stimulating the right emotion with red

There are a few tactics you should be familiar with regarding red branding to make sure that your brand message is clear. Adjust the color with the help of using lighter tones of red to communicate a feminine and softer sentiment and darker tones for more authoritative and fiery emotion.

A specific tone of red gives a very specific emotion that is why larger sections of websites or backgrounds are of lighter red hues and, the darker red tones are used frugally in graphic elements to highlight a word/phrase. Red is also a popular choice of color for call-to-action.

You can read more about the colors in branding here.

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