Colorful Impact

A product has one-twentieth of a second to halt the customer’s attention on a shelf or display.¹ That’s a blink of an eye. Research conducted by the secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo in 2004, documented that 96.6 percent of respondents said visual factors were most important when deciding whether to purchase. Color evokes action.

Colorful Consistency

We’re big fans of consistency. In fact, we urge you to resist trendy fonts, colors, and layouts for your advertising materials. Think about the big brand names in the marketplace. You recognize their logos and advertising styles because they’re consistent. The company may change design elements—photos, banners, call-outs, etc., but their overall color scheme, layout, logo placement, font selection, and slogans—their brand identity—remains unchanged. A University of Loyola, Maryland, study determined that color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent. Color is powerful.

 

As employees, we get bored with what we think is “same old, same old” long before the member does. The threshold to memory is three views of printed material. If you’re communicating with your members on a monthly basis or even less frequently, it takes even longer for them to recognize the communication comes from My Credit Union. Dramatically changing colors and layouts destroys any brand equity you’ve built in terms of audience recognition. Essentially, you’re starting over. In a competitive marketplace, that’s a serious consideration. Color is memorable.

Colorful Conclusions

When you spread out your recent advertising materials on your desk and they don’t look like they all came from the same company, it’s time to talk to us. We can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your current designs and recommend changes. We’ll create layouts that are flexible enough to accommodate changing messages but build brand identity for you. Doing this also takes the guesswork and cost out of your production process. If color can increase readership by 40 percent, and you bolster that with a consistent layout and branding scheme, you’re on your way to building a powerful, memorable market identity. Color has impact.

1. Color Matters, Jill Morton, 2005.