Color is a decision, not a preference.
Why your competitor's corporate blue should matter more to you than you think.
here are entire sectors dominated by a color. Banking is blue. Healthcare is green or light blue. Energy is green. Insurance is dark blue or red. These colors are not accidental; they are the result of decades of advertising investment that has associated those colors with those categories in the consumer's mind.
When a new company enters one of those sectors and chooses the category color, it becomes just another one. The consumer perceives it as part of the landscape, not as something different. That may be correct if the strategy is trust and familiarity. But if the strategy is differentiation, the category color is the worst possible starting point.
Color is the identity element that the brain processes fastest. Before reading the name, before recognizing the symbol, the brain has already processed the color and activated the associations it has with it. That is why the color decision is, in many ways, the most important identity decision a brand makes.
And yet, it is the decision most frequently made for the wrong reasons. The founder has a favorite color. The designer proposes something they find attractive. The management committee votes and blue wins because nobody objects. The result is a color that says nothing about the brand, that differentiates it from nobody, that has no reason to exist beyond the personal preference of someone who no longer works at the company.
The color map of your sector
Before choosing the color of a brand, we do a simple exercise: we put the logos of the ten or fifteen main competitors on a page. The pattern is usually immediate. There is a dominant color, the category color, and there are one or two that have dared to step outside it.
Those one or two are the ones we remember. Not because they are better, but because they are different. Difference, in an environment saturated with visual stimuli, is the first step toward recognition.
The color map exercise also reveals the colors that are available. If the sector is predominantly blue and green, orange, black, terracotta, or gold are available. Available does not mean correct; it means that nobody has claimed them yet, and that if you choose them with conviction and work them with consistency, they can become yours.
We worked with a financial services company that wanted to differentiate itself from traditional banking. The sector was navy blue and grey. We proposed a warm orange, the color of energy and accessibility, the color that says money does not have to be intimidating. Three years later, that orange is the most recognizable identity asset of the company.
Differentiation versus belonging
The tension in color choice is always the same: you want to belong to your category so the client recognizes you as relevant, but you want to differentiate yourself within it so they remember you and not the sector.
There is no universal answer. It depends on the maturity of the brand, its positioning, its history, its moment. A new brand in a consolidated sector may benefit from aligning with the category color to gain credibility before differentiating. An established brand that wants to reposition itself can use color as a signal of change.
What is universal is that the decision has to be conscious. Not choosing blue because it is beautiful or because the founder prefers it; choosing it because the brand strategy is trust and authority, and blue is the color that best communicates those values in that specific sector. Or choosing orange because the strategy is accessibility and energy, and orange breaks the sector pattern in a way that reinforces that positioning.
The brands that have broken with their category color most successfully are those that did so with a clear reason. Not for aesthetic whim, but because the different color was the visual expression of a different value proposition.
The color that lasts
The color of a brand has to work across all media: digital, print, signage, packaging, clothing, vehicles. It has to work in black and white when there is no other option. It has to work small, in a browser favicon, and large, on the facade of a building.
And it has to still be right in ten years. Fashionable colors age because their relevance depends on a cultural context that changes. The avocado green of the seventies. The lilac of the nineties. The coral of 2018. Each of those colors was modern at the time and seems dated now.
True colors endure because they do not depend on a trend; they depend on a conviction. Coca-Cola's red has been the same for more than a century because it is not a fashionable color; it is the visual expression of an energy and a joy that have been part of the brand's identity since its founding.
When we choose color for a brand, we think about the conviction behind it. Why this color and not another? What does it say about the brand that no other color can say? If there is no clear answer to those questions, the color is not well chosen, regardless of how beautiful it is.
