The Importance of Colour in Industry

A product’s appearance has a significant impact on consumer purchasing behavior. When encountering a product, consumers quickly make decisions about that product’s utility, value and intended use, so brands across industries need to make a positive first impression. Colour is one effective way companies communicate information through product appearance.

Consumer Colour Perception

The human eye can recognize up to 10 million different colours within the visible light spectrum. Over time, many shades have gained associations with certain objects and ideas.

On a practical level, colour communicates important information about surroundings. Depending on the context, a colour can efficiently deliver information and encourage observers to modify their behavior. Consider the bright safety colours used around potentially hazardous environments such as construction sites. The bright orange safety cones, road signs and worker apparel stand out and warn people to proceed with caution.

Colour can also evoke an emotional response. Although the perception of a colour’s meaning may vary between cultures, colour psychology suggests that manipulation of colour can influence consumer behavior, making colour an important tool across industries.

Brand Colours Vary by Industry to Create Recognizable Packaging and Logos

The packaging is often the first thing a consumer notices about a product. It may contain other design elements, but the colour and logo stand out. When a brand uses the same colour consistently on its packaging, signage and other materials, the colour or colour combination may become synonymous with the brand, making products easy to distinguish on store shelves.

It’s important to note that ideal brand colours vary by industry. Blue and purple tend to work well in industries that need to foster relaxation and trust, such as health care and finance. In contrast, colours such as red and orange exude passion, determination, confidence and optimism, making them ideal for more upbeat brands. In addition, some so-called harmonious colour combinations produce positive responses. Harmonious colours can be triads, complementary, split-complementary or analogous.

Colour Indicates Product Quality

In some industries, colour indicates a product’s overall quality and ability to meet consumer needs. For example, colours in the manufacturing industry must be consistent as they influence the product’s function — after all, you wouldn’t want to buy paint that comes with a slightly different colour every time.

Industries that use colour as an indicator of quality include:

• Cosmetics. Cosmetics manufacturers check for colour consistency to ensure customers receive products that look good on their skin and in the packaging.
• Pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical companies use colour as an indicator of product stability, degradation, safety and overall efficacy.
• Food and beverage. Food and beverage companies uses colour analysis to assess the quality of raw ingredients and confirm the caliber of finished products without touching them.

How to Ensure Your Products Meet Colour Standards

For a product or piece of packaging to meet brand standards and achieve the desired outcome, its colour needs to meet exacting specifications. This means manufacturers need highly accurate methods for detecting slight colour differences.

The human eye perceives colour unreliably. Spectrophotometers solve this problem by providing objective data about an object’s colour. Learn more about colours and their importance and how the right spectrophotometry equipment from HunterLab could solve your industry’s challenges by contacting us today.