Blink Twice
Colour Is Strategy, Not Taste
Five ways the best brands choose colour, and none of them start with a mood board.
Cover the logo on your packaging. If it could belong to any brand in your category, colour is a big part of the reason.
Most brands pick colour the way they'd pick paint for the kitchen. It looks good, it feels right, and it ends up the same green as every other wellness brand. The best brands choose the colour that makes their position obvious. Here are the five ways we see them do it.
1. Counterpositioning
Find the colour your category lives in and go the other way. AG1 made green the colour of daily supplements, so IM8 went red, and stood out on every shelf and feed it shared with green. Klarna did the same in finance. Banking was a sea of navy and blue, so Klarna went pink.
2. Engineered visibility
Pick a colour designed to be seen, then put it where people will see it. Monzo's hot coral card turns every payment into an ad, because it's impossible to miss on a table. IKEA's bright blue bag does the same job on the bus.
3. Lean into the accident
Sometimes the colour picks you. Hermès orange came from wartime shortages, when the cream boxes it used ran out and orange paperboard was all its supplier had left. Hermès kept it, and the orange box is now as much a part of the brand as the saddle stitch.
4. Own a moment
A colour can carry a moment so completely that the moment belongs to you. In the summer of 2023, Barbie's film turned its pink into the colour of the season, and brands lined up to borrow it.
5. The scarcity signal
A colour can stand for something people can't simply buy. Tiffany's blue box has long come only with a purchase, never on its own, so the colour itself became a sign that someone spent money on you.
How to choose yours
Start with your Red Ocean Map. Write down every colour your category uses, and you'll see the defaults you'd otherwise pick by accident.
Then go back to your Story. Each play suits a different position. A challenger wants counterpositioning. A brand whose product is seen in public wants engineered visibility. A brand with a strange piece of history might already have its accident.
Then test it. Does the colour make your position more obvious, or just prettier? If you swapped it for a competitor's, would anyone notice?
Colour is part of the Signal, one of the eight moves in a brand world. It works best when it carries a story, which is why the Story comes first.
The free Category Colour Map helps you see your category's colours and pick a play.
Then see where your brand world breaks. The Brand World Score is eight questions, two minutes and a score out of 10.