By Susan Hayden

Just thinking about colour makes my heart beat faster and my blood pressure rise. Why? Because I am a colour consultant and educator, and I understand colour’s amazing power to ‘communicate’ with your customer — despite the intense and inescapable distractions of today’s busy world.

     When used strategically, colour has the ability to speak for you — catching the consumer’s attention, creating corporate image and broadcasting promotional messages. At every level of your business, colour brings more than aesthetics to the job, selling products and services better than ‘black and white’ by as much as 88 per cent. Learning and recall also increase by 75 per cent, because colour exists in a symbolic world, where reactions may be closer to physiology than to perception.

Marketing an image
It is a well-known fact that people tend to buy psychological and social satisfaction rather than products. Look at Ralph Lauren’s wildly successful marketing of his image — the dream of “old money.” These collections all turn to burgundy, forest green, tans and dark blue colour schemes, all of which are associated with tradition, success and security. Colour has the power to communicate emotion and the essence of your product without speaking a word. It can immediately convey messages such as freshness, durability, youthfulness, innovation or energy in an instant, and a product or concept can fail badly in the marketplace if the chosen palette is unappealing or misinterpreted. Like it or not, we really are products of our cultural conditioning, and a large part of that conditioning involves the application of colour. The good news is that you have control over this powerful tool.

The Colour Wheel
Let me introduce you to the colour wheel, an amazing little invention that will help you understand how colours ‘work.’ It represents the six main colours, and explains and simplifies their applications and combinations all in the turn of a dial. Artists and designers have used this colour wheel for centuries, to guide them in the best use of colour in design. The warm colours on the wheel — yellow, orange and red are more highly assertive, energized, offer high visibility, advance towards you, and create a warmer, more exciting visual story. The cool colours on the wheel – green, blue and purple are more passive and soothing, and recede from the viewer’s eye, leaving you with a cool, refreshing, calming feeling. They are also achievement-oriented. A colour “story” made up of all warm or all cool colours will exaggerate that feeling of heat or coolness, whereas a story made up of cool and warm colours will offer more contrast, which always makes every colour involved more dynamic and eye-catching. The further apart on the colour wheel any two colours are, the more contrast will be created between them.

     It is often recommended you utilize no more than three colours for a basic colour story, or the visual message becomes confusing. Think of the traditional red/green Christmas story, and you have a very simple, memorable, high-contrast colour combo. A greenhouse/nursery could easily select yellow, blue and green for its corporate colours. Read on to find out why. Once you choose your corporate colours, everything you design should use these colours to maintain a strong image.

Colour personalities
Each colour has its own personality; and therefore “sends out” its own special subconscious message, offering you the possibility to enhance the character and identity of any product or service. Within the warm group, yellow is uplifting, sunny, cozy and happy. It is also the brightest and the first noticed, so it makes for a strong partner in your corporate colour message. People tend to like the golden tones the most. Orange expresses radiation, communication and action. It is receptive and warm, and outgoing and playful. There is a perfume called Happy, which has been well marketed with bright orange magazine ads of young women dancing. Red is the colour dynamo – exciting, stimulating, powerful, sexy and strong. In marketing, it represents strength and action. Think of Pizza Pizza — fast, fun food and faster delivery.

     The cool colours send a very different message. Green suggests security, optimism, honesty and growth, so who better to use it in their corporate logo than TD Bank, where you put your money to grow safely. Also the colour of nature’s bounty, it represents summer foliage and calm coolness of the great outdoors. ‘True blue’ embodies the relaxed, likeable qualities of your best friend, the trustworthiness of your banker’s blue suit and the infinity of the bluest sky. A relaxing and refreshing partner, it partners beautifully with yellow for the Blockbuster logo, which subconsciously encourages you to enjoy a movie in the comforts of your own home. Purple is the colour of good taste, distinction and majesty. Regal, aloof and elegant, it best represents products and services for those with discriminating taste, but is not really used that much in the marketing of retail images. It can also be a mystical and mysterious colour, well suited for anything magical and unusual. Imagine how quickly your window displays can communicate their message with the instant subconscious translation made by colour.

     Adding black or white to any colour story doesn’t change the emotional response of your viewer, but it can certainly ‘pump up’ the contrast volume on your message, with regard to visibility and readability. Grey is a conservative neutral, which will not create a great deal of drama, and makes little statement on its own. The neutrals — taupe (cool and upscale) and camel/beige (warm and middle-of-the-road) make great backgrounds to which to apply other colours. Silver and gold are linked with luxury and technology.

Tints, tones and shades
Add white to any colour and it becomes a tint. Tints are lighter, airier, less dramatic and sometimes more feminine. You can make a small retail space appear larger through the use of tints and light neutrals. Add grey to a colour, and it becomes a tone — muted, softer and more subdued-like dusty rose. When you add black to any colour, it becomes darker, deeper and more masculine and dramatic — like burgundy. Darker colours will always make a space look smaller, but small and dramatic can be very powerful in a retail space that wants to embody a dramatic image. Imagine the drama of that dark green, which is so famous at The Body Shop.

Bright or dark
It has been found that primary and bright colours appeal to lower income levels, pastels and neutrals appeal to upscale sophisticated consumers, and dark colours appeal to older people and men. You should even consider the colours of the packaging of your merchandise, since those colours will also compete with your customer’s attention on the shelf. So much to think about.

     Brighter colours will always advance towards the viewer more than darker ones, so bright red creates much more excitement than burgundy ever could. Think bright when you are designing focal points in-store or promotional signing for seasonal sales and clear-outs. Nothing beats bold, warm colours when it comes to shouting out an important message.

In-store colours
Select in-store colours that best represent the image you want your company to present to the world, and complement/contrast well with your merchandise. Just imagine walking into a garden centre as a customer to see lots of rich green foliage and terra cotta pots positioned against a golden yellow wall.

     You can also apply the colours differently for different purposes throughout your retail interior, whether it is your logo, your storefront, your retail environment or your institutional signing. Maybe your store will have a yellow exterior, with each one of your departments featuring a different wall colour to represent the merchandise mix. Perhaps your departmental signing will be colour coded, and you will select a special colour to represent your store’s look each season, focusing your choice on in-store promotional signing and display backgrounds. Permanent corporate com­munications should be unified, constant, recognizable and unique. You need to develop a format for these pieces that doesn’t vary, so the customer will immediately recognize you by your colours — like he recognizes Home Depot’s bright orange awning.

Be BOLD
Be bold in your selection of store colours. Paint is inexpensive, allowing you to quickly, easily and affordably inject new life into your retail environment whenever you feel it needs a ‘facelift.’ Slash a panel of a bright hue in behind your cash desk, or paint a cement floor and seal it to resist wear. Simply add a bold colour to the back wall of your store, and watch your sales skyrocket, perhaps for the first time, since colour can lead the eye to areas that may have previously been non-productive.

     If that’s not enough to think about, be aware that lighting in your store will greatly enhance or detract from this colour effort. Merchandise may mysteriously sell in one store and not in another due to a lighting variable. Regular incandescent light bulbs create a yellow light, which will distort most colours and make your green foliage look greyish. The wrong fluorescent light will create the wrong atmosphere for your merchandise, and product is best displayed in the same sort of light in which it will be used. To this end, the new halogen lights have received glowing reports with regard to colour rendition, and will greatly add to the efficiency of your sales floor. Speak to a lighting expert to be sure you are not wasting your efforts here.

     Marketing psychologists say that a lasting impression is made within 90 seconds, and that colour accounts for 60 per cent of the acceptance or rejection of an object or person. Because colour impressions are both quickly formed and hard to change, decisions about colour are critical factors in the success or failure on your sales floor. Make your customer’s heart beat faster as she approaches your store and is irresistibly drawn over the lease line and into your amazing new colour-saturated retail environment. Plan for an injection of new colour excitement into your tired retail space. Your competition will be “green with envy” and your sales will be “red hot.”

Susan Hayden is a professor in the Visual Merchandising Arts program at Sheridan College in Oakville, ON.