Colour therapy in branding is the strategic use of colours to evoke emotions, influence perceptions, and shape consumer behavior through your marketing and brand identity. It is rooted in colour psychology, which studies how different colour hues (shades) affect human emotions, decisions and associations.
Just as colour therapy (chromo-therapy) is used in wellness and healing to create emotional balance, branding colour therapy leverages colours to create a brand’s personality, impact customer feelings and drive engagement.
As a creative wanting to ensure colour consistency across all your marketing channels. AI won’t take your job away. But someone using AI strategically may just.
Why Is Colour, And Especially Brand Colour Consistency, So Important?
Colour is the visual component people remember most about a brand, followed closely by shapes / symbols then numbers and finally words. For example, the real McDonald’s is easy to detect in the image below.
You’ve probably noticed that some brands are immediately recognisable by their colours. This isn’t by chance. Using the same colours consistently can increase brand recognition by up to 80%. (Source: University of Loyola, Maryland study).
Brand colours help customers remember the brand and build trust. Especially within the entrepreneurial, I so very often see Solopreneurs and SMMEs using all kind of shades of their brand in different settings. One shade on print (especially when presentations are handed out in printed format), another shade on a monitor, and even more worryingly, logos printed in the wrong colour.
In short, using consistent colours help brands build a strong brand identity. This can drive customer loyalty and lead to business success. So, to boost your brand, focus on consistency in your brand colours—especially your logo.
The Google “41 Shades of Blue” Experiment
Quite a few years ago Google launched ads on Gmail. In their search they had ads on the side, little blue links that go to other websites, and the same thing on Gmail. But they recognised that the shades of blue in those two different products were slightly different when they linked to ads (“hyperlinks”). In the world of the hippo (highest paid person’s opinion), you ask the chief designer or the marketing director to pick a blue and that’s the solution. But in the world of data you can run experiments to find the right answer. They ran “1%” experiments, showing 1% of users one blue, and another experiment showing 1% another blue. And actually, to make sure they covered all their bases, they ran forty other experiments showing all the shades of blue you could possibly imagine.
Google established which shades of blue people liked the most, demonstrated by how much they clicked on them. As a result it was learned that a slightly “purpler” shade of blue was more conducive to clicking than a slightly greener shade of blue. This form of testing Google undertook is known as A/B testing (offering users two different versions of a site and picking the most effective one).
It has supposedly increased the advertising revenue by 200 Million US$! However: when put into perspective, it’s less spectacular. And even more: the test was fundamentally flawed.
The Case For Humanity
Two key flaws in this test were:
1. Different Monitors Display Colours Differently: Various screens (laptops, desktops, mobile devices) have different colour calibration, brightness levels and contrast settings. The same shade of blue could look different depending on the user’s device, making results inconsistent.
2. The Test Focused on Data, Not Human Experience: The A/B test optimised for click-through rate (CTR), but it didn’t consider user experience and aesthetic cohesion. Plus, too many incremental variations may not have made a meaningful difference beyond statistical noise.
The Case For AI
AI tools can assist greatly. Dries Conje, CEO and founder of Deep Learning Café, suggests staring with Canva’s AI-powered design assistant to generate colour palettes, then test different colour variations with Google Optimize or Adobe Sensei. And then, finally bring it all together with your experience, intuition and empathy. “AI can suggest the perfect shade of blue, but you still decide if it fits the soul of your brand,” says Dries.
The Case For Both in Colour Therapy
AI is revolutionising colour therapy in branding by making colour selection more scientific, data-driven, and adaptable. Just like Google found a “purpler” blue to boost ad revenue, brands today can use AI to choose colours that drive conversions, brand loyalty, and emotional engagement.
AI, however, is only as powerful as the humans who guide it. The magic happens at the intersection of technology and human ingenuity – where AI supports, but does not replace, the empathy, intuition and originality that make human communication irreplaceable. This bittersweet combination is not a battle for dominance, but an evolving partnership, one that, when used wisely, allows both AI and humanity to thrive together.
