Colors for Effective Advertising
Colors can seriously affect the mood of your viewer when you work in the realm of advertising. You need to choose colors in your advertising that will affect the viewer to the extent that you intend to. Your colors in your advertising also need to stay relevant to the product or service that you are selling. The colors you choose should incite a call to action. These are three ways in which colors affect your advertising campaign.
#1 The Mood
The colors that you choose will imbue a certain mood upon the viewer. Alexander Djerassi is educated in the study of how color affects marketing and has much to say about it. You need to be careful what colors you use in your advertising campaign. For example, if you are looking to sell a product that soothes chronic pain, you should use soothing colors like light blue and purple. Using these colors will give the viewer a sensation of calm and they will associate this with using your product.
If, on the other hand, your product has to do with fitness, then you will want to motivate the viewer. You will want to use colors that insight action and physical activity. Colors that do this include red, orange and yellow. You can also use neon colors for this effect, but not pastels or muted earth tones. Warm colors that move the viewer towards a sentiment of motivation and activity.
#2 The Relevance to Your Product
Most importantly, the colors that you use in your advertising need to be relevant to the product or service you are selling. For example, if you are selling a meditation retreat, you shouldn’t use neon colors for the main portion of the advertisement. The purpose of a meditation retreat is to assist the participants in relaxation and calm. You should use colors that are related to this, such as pastels, blues or neutral earth tones. Alexander Djerassi is a proponent of this call to action method. Do not use neon colors in excess and do not use bright reds or oranges.
#3 The Call to Action
A portion of your advertising campaign needs to be aimed at calling the viewer to take the action of contacting your company. Therefore, the latter portion of your advertising campaign should include bright colors. For example, if you are running a TV commercial for a meditation retreat, you can use pastels for most of the TV commercial and for the very last part where you ask the customer to call, you can put the phone number in neon writing. The call to action is an exception to the rule that your color scheme should always stay relevant to your product.
This is because no matter what your product is, you will need to incite the viewer to purchase or contact your company at some point or another. In order to do this you should use colors bright enough to grab their attention and motivate them toward activity. Neon colors can do the job if for some reason warm colors don’t fit in with the theme of your product.