What is your favorite color? Everybody has one, and the color you choose says a lot about who you are. We often don’t stop to consider this fact, but color surrounds us in our daily lives. Wherever we look, color is found.

Some colors appeal to us and draw our attention towards them, while others garner no reaction from many people. Smart marketers know that the use of color in websites, labels, and packaging for branding can turn sales from stagnant into superb.

What is Color?

Color is basically white light broken down, a dissection of wavelengths. Viewing the various wavelengths allows the human eye to distinguish each as a separate color. Objects either reflect or absorb the wavelengths. For example, when we gaze upon a green lime, the green wavelength is being reflected by the fruit, while all others are absorbed.

Feeling Color

Each person feels emotions when they look at color. The warm side of the spectrum is red, which also include yellow and orange. These may indicate passion, leave us feeling uncomfortable, or even feeling anger.

Blue is the cool side of the spectrum, and it includes green and purple. These colors are calming and serene, often inspiring trust as well. Building your brand around color will have major advantages if done correctly.

The perception of color is subjective, although there is a universal significance attached to certain shades. For instance, red makes us think of fire, stop, or hot. White, on the other hand, instills feelings of peace, purity, and sterilization. It is for these reasons the psychology of color is an important tool in the weapons arsenal for brand marketing.

The Colors and How They Influence Customers’ Buying Patterns

Red, green, yellow, and blue are the psychological primary colors. There is a direct correlation between these colors and emotions, the mind, the body, and the crucial equilibrium between all three. What exactly makes colors influence sales? Find out why these ten colors are the top choices and how they work on the minds of consumers.

1. Yellow

Yellow is associated with memory, intensity, friendliness, emotional strength, self-esteem, and confidence. It can be a tricky color to use in certain situations, but from a branding and marketing perspective, yellow is a happy color.

It is the strongest color psychologically, and it stimulates the brain to increase memory function. It draws the attention of customers, especially when used as an accent color and is often used in window displays.

2. Green

Green leaves consumers feeling relaxed and positive. It is also associated with indulgence, restoration, rest, harmony, environmental awareness, balance, and reassurance. The eye perceives green with no adjustments, accounting for the feeling of restfulness often experienced when being outdoors, for example.

Brighter shades of green indicate healthy energy and vibrancy, while the darker hues relax moods. From a branding standpoint, it leaves customers with the impression of a product with a friendly attitude.

3. Blue

Blue is the favorite of all colors worldwide, and it affects the mental, rather than the physical aspect. It is associated with duty, reflection, logic, trust, intelligence, communication, and reliability. Softer tones promote concentration and soothe the mind, while darker hues promote clear thoughts.

Since consumers see blue as a trustworthy color, from a branding standpoint, it instills the consumer with confidence in their purchase or choice of service. Many top brands have chosen blue to build their brand, including Facebook, Chase, and AMEX.

4. Pink

Pink is a feminine and romantic color that is often used to market products aimed at young girls and women. It is associated with delicateness, love, trendiness, physical tranquility, warmth, nurturing, and innocence.

Since pink is a red shade, it physically affects humans but in a soothing way, as opposed to the intense stimulation brought on by true red. Although women show no partiality for the color according to surveys, it is still widely used for brand marketing targeting that demographic.

Light shades may lower blood pressure, while brighter hues may cause blood pressure to increase.

5. White

While black absorbs color completely, white completely reflects it. It gives a sharp perception of increased space but can be a strain to look at when there are no other colors present. It is associated with cleanliness, calmness, justice, fresh beginnings, clarity, sterility, hygiene, efficiency, purity, sophistication, and simplicity.

From a marketing and branding standpoint, white is often the dominant background color used to set off accent colors.

6. Red

The passion of red is well known to marketers. There is power behind the color that grabs our attention right away. It has a physical effect that increases pulse rate and stimulates.

Red is associated with warmth, strength, stimulation, physical courage, excitement, love, and energy. It is a very basic color with no subtlety and has the longest wavelength. Red is also an exclamation color that encourages consumers to act, making it effective for sales promotions.

7. Teal

Teal is not present on the fundamental color wheel, but it is a striking color that is fresh and less formal than true blue. It is associated with vitality and focus and has true staying power. When people think of teal, they often refer to blue skies or appliances in the kitchen during the mid-century.

Tiffany & Co. is one of the largest brands to use teal. They have a patent on their “robin’s egg” blue color. Marketers use teal in branding to promote an image that is trustworthy and carefree.

8. Orange

Orange is a mix of yellow and red, making reactions both emotional and physical. It is associated with fun, physical comfort, security, abundance, warmth, food, caution, and energy.

Although a struggling color, marketers use orange in branding to force consumers to take a second look and decide whether the brand is for them. It focuses on aggression to loudly shout a call to action, making it perform well in situations like impulse buys.

9. Black

Black is associated with substance, glamour, efficiency, sophistication, emotional safety, and security. It is perceived as having absolute clarity, seriousness, and uncompromising excellence.

Many logos use a combination of black and white, but black needs to be used sparingly to be seen as dramatic. Many premium brands such as Chanel, Burberry, Prada, and Cartier market with the careful use of black.

10. Purple

Purple is a fun color that has close ties to the spirit world. It is the shortest wavelength and is associated with luxury, quality, truth, creativity, spiritual awareness, authenticity, containment, and royalty.

Brands that use purple tend to stand out and receive consumer attention, mostly because the link with royalty gives the impression of the finest quality products. It appeals to children, making it a fixture in toy and candy packaging. For adults, purple is often featured in anti-aging and beauty products.

Final thoughts

Depending on the product, color is responsible for consumer choice in close to 90% percent of impulse buys. Since our brain tends to prefer brands that are recognizable immediately, brand identity creation should rely heavily on color.

Customer reaction to your color choice is not a complete science, but making certain predictions are possible. For example, if you want the consumer to feel delicate, consider using pink. If you want the consumer to confident and happy, consider the use of yellow.

The proper labeling and packaging will make all the difference to your sales, so consider your options carefully before making a final decision.

A bunch of forums talked about entering in your password by just typing it in, even though you couldn’t see it. That was not my issue. So if you’re here, it’s probably not your issue either.

Here’s how I have managed to fix the problem:

Install Duet on an iPad

We have an iPad. So I got this app called Duet, installed it on my Macbook (not much help if you’re currently in this situation, I know) and the iPad. Now, when this happens, I can plug the iPad into my Mac and at least see what’s happening on the screen.

This has the bonus side effect of often causing the Mac’s screen to display properly again as well, just by plugging the iPad in with Duet turned on.

Run Out of Power

Sometimes Duet doesn’t help. And in the initial case, I didn’t have Duet installed on the Mac. So, I just let it run out of power. Doing so triggered the red, dead battery icon, and that somehow caused the screen to work properly again once I plugged it in.

Don’t Ever Restart

I only seem to actually have this problem when my machine needs to restart / reboot. As long as it remains on, closed but not powered down, or in sleep mode, these problems don’t occur.

Sure, plenty of Mexican’s in touristy areas speak English, and prefer to use it with you, even if you try to speak Spanish with them. But, frankly, they’re working. They want to sell you souvenirs or serve you food. If you actually want to speak with someone who lives here, who is genuinely interested in communicating with you, Spanish is the only way to go.

Thus, Duolingo.

A fun interface and easy to use iPhone app gave Duolingo the edge when I was first trying to figure out how I’d do this. And when you compare the price (free!) to Rosetta Stone…well, it’s phenomenal!

The web interface is even better, offering timed practices and making it a little easier to enter your answers. I’ve come quite far with more or less this app alone (and of course, speaking with actual people).

So today I was browsing around their site and discovered they’re from Pittsburgh!

While it’s relatively new, I believe, one of the best things about Duolingo is that it has all of these “for Schools” features built in. I homeschool my fourteen year old son and Duolingo makes it incredibly easy for me to keep track of his progress, from simply glancing at his points, to assigning him specific lessons when I see he’s struggling with something in the real world.

The fact that Duolingo was created by a CMU professor and graduate student, that is was cooked right here in good ol’ Pittsburgh, PA, is just icing on the cake!

I like to use Vimeo, because I think their player just looks nicer. Sometimes I make more videos than I’m allowed to upload in one week there, so every few years I’ll buy a Vimeo Plus membership for a couple of months while I’m making and uploading videos.

The membership more or less allows you to upload more videos / more data per week than their free accounts. There are other features too, like stats, blah blah blah but that’s why I buy it.

I cancelled my membership this month as I haven’t uploaded any videos, let alone a bunch, in over two months. I received this email from Vimeo today, emphasis mine:

Dear Nathan,

Oh no, your Vimeo Plus membership expires on March 02, 2015!

If you don’t renew, you could be in danger of losing some of your videos, along with all your amazing Plus benefits. Things don’t have to end this way — take action now to renew your membership and keep enjoying Vimeo Plus.

That “you could be in danger…” part is a link, so I clicked it. It takes me to a page with the content shown in the screenshot below:

Here’s the issue, and the reason I’m bothering to write this: Why is Vimeo using some strong arm tactic to try and make me afraid that I’ll lose my videos if I don’t continue my membership?

There is nothing on that page about which videos I may or may not lose. All of my videos are still in my account as of today. I get that they need to make money to stay in business, but it feels like they’re trying to trick me into doing something I don’t need to do, and threatening to remove my videos but not really telling me why.

I find it all quite dodgy. Remember when we all invented the web together and most everything was largely free? Or at least freemium? Is this the new direction we’ll see things headed – if you don’t pay up, that thing that used to be free but then you paid us some money for will now be taken away from you!

If they do indeed remove some of my videos, it’s like they’re essentially rewarding people who’ve never had a paid account and then punishing those of us who did but chose to take a break from it for awhile.

I just hope Vimeo doesn’t move into the sauce business, because it would no doubt be of the variety weak.

Last night we gave Uber Car a ring.

If you haven’t heard, Uber is sort of like a taxi service. But so much better. Pittsburghers who’ve ever tried calling Yellow Cab will know full and well that it’s a pain. Here’s the typical process for getting a cab in Pittsburgh:

1. Call a dispatcher.
2. Wait five minutes for them to pickup.
3. Tell them some very specific information which you may or may not know, like cross streets and exact addresses.
4. Wait twenty to forty-five minutes for the cab to show up.
5. Have the right amount of cash to pay the cabbie, or get rude looks from him when you ask to pay with a credit card.
6. Tip the guy for all of this rudeness and slow service.

If the bars are letting out on the Southside, increase all wait times by a factor of ten. It more or less sucks, and public transportation in the city isn’t available at times when many folks need a ride: after having a few too many beverages.

Uber Car to the Rescue!

Now, here’s the process for getting an Uber Car:

1. Open their app on your phone.
2. Click a button to more or less auto-locate where you are (or where you’ll be).
3. Type in where you’re going, just like you’d do a search on Google Maps or Yelp.
4. Wait about two minutes.
5. Everything gets paid for via a credit card you have on file with your account, no money or credit cards are handled in the car at all.
6. There’s no tip involved either, Uber drivers get paid what they get paid.

Why Uber is Better than a Taxi

The app’s ability to show you exactly where your driver is and how long until it arrives, an easy estimate and super easy method of making payment, typically cheaper pricing, and that you get to ride in a bunch of different types of cars makes Uber incredibly fun and so much better than a taxi. I could see taxi companies going out of business unless they change to this model.

Give Uber a Try Today!