Humans are ultra-visual creatures. That's why Lamborghini owes it's popularity to visually breathtaking auto-architecture and not new car smell. That is why people decide who to date, what food to eat and, especially, what products to buy based on looks.
Here are 6 ways that color (one of the most vital visual aspects of marketing) affects your product sales.
1. Color Is Almost Everything
You will be stuck without a paddle up No Sales Creek if you tackle product design without a solid color game plan. Dig these statistics. Your customers believe the look of your product is a whopping 93x more important than it's sound/smell. 85% of shoppers regularly buy items based solely on color.
2. Color Breeds Familiarity
Your customers are like rabid sports fans. Imagine the outrage if the San Diego Chargers abandoned their trademark gold and navy blue team colors and replaced them with gray and lime green. Chaos would ensue in California. Your customers use the trademark colors of your packaging design to easily spot your product among the endless minutia of the modern marketing landscape. Choose color with care. Color will be the soul of your product design.
3. Different Colors For Different Customers
Here's a fun experiment. Take a tour of your local businesses (psychical and digital). Notice anything interesting? Restaurants, banks and clothing stores are decorated with profoundly different color arrangements. Different fish need different bait. Likewise, different customers require different pigments. For example, Lien Design (a creative graphic design and branding company) uses yellow/orange as prime color because of it's creative and attention grabbing qualities. A warm, inviting color like brown works better for restaurants like The California Pizza Kitchen for obvious reasons.
4. Color Tells Your Customers What To Feel
Color is to packaging design what landscape is to a city: Both invoke specific feelings. Soaking in the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean from the sandy shore of San Diego, California will summon different feelings than a tour of the Grand Canyon. Like landscape, every hue strokes it's own unique emotional note. Green eases. Red seduces. Orange shocks. Brush up on the psychology of colors and play your customers emotions like a well-tuned fiddle.
5. Signs Deserve Color Too
The importance of color does not end at the edges of your product design. Not even close. Branding companies like Lien Design exist in part because signs and advertisements suffer greatly from a lack of color. In fact, colored text is 42x more likely to be read than old fashioned black and white text. Color greatly improves reading comprehension as well.
6. Men and Women Respond Differently To Colors
Men respond well to cool, dark colors like blues, silvers and grays. Women like bright, energetic colors like pink, purple and green. Suffice it to say, if you're selling shotgun shells, the product design shouldn't include hot pink trim.