In branding and marketing, color is so important because it can trigger powerful emotions and help solidify memories. When used strategically and with great care, color can also encourage certain behaviors; for example, red can captivate someone’s attention, but it can also incite a negative reaction. In this blog post, we’ll be discussing how you can use color to your benefit in jewelry marketing.

Every jewelry brand with a premeditated brand identity has a color palette that remains consistent across all customer touchpoints. For example, Tiffany & Co.’s color palette includes robin’s egg blue with black and white as accent colors. Cartier is fire-engine red with black and white as accent colors. The Last Line is a very colorful brand, with tan as the primary color and turquoise, red, and pink as accent colors.

A brand color palette typically consists of three to five colors: a bold main color, a complementary color, and one to three neutrals. A brand with only three colors would have only one accent neutral, while a brand with five colors would have an accent neutral, a dark neutral, and a light neutral. Throughout the branding and marketing, the first two colors will likely be utilized the most. However, in some cases a jewelry brand needs additional colors for an ecommerce website, social media, and other assets. In general, a logo should include no more than two colors and should also work in black and white.

More than anything, you should remember that there really isn’t a right or wrong way to approach the creation of your jewelry brand’s color palette. You should also remember that “color is too dependent on personal experiences to be universally translated to specific feelings”, according to one article from Help Scout. However, color theory can guide you to make good decisions about mixing colors, since it outlines the best practices and conventions for using colors. For example, color theory demonstrates that some colors are complementary, which means they cancel each other out when mixed, producing a grayscale color like white or black. Furthermore, a color wheel model shows that certain shades of colors can be combined in pleasing and harmonious ways. The trouble with color theory is that even color theorists sometimes disagree on the rules and guidelines. You should definitely know the rules, but you should also be aware that rules about color can be broken.

To choose your color palette, you can look to color psychology, your target audience, your competitors, and your intuition about your brand. First, you should at least know the basics about color psychology (but take them with a grain of salt), which states the following:

Red: Red is a powerful and dynamic color that can represent strong emotions like love and fear.
Orange: Orange is friendly, fun, and energetic.
Yellow: Yellow represents joyfulness and optimism.
Green: Green is often associated with balance and harmony.
Blue: Blue can calm the nervous system, and it often represents trustworthiness.
Purple: Purple is often related to creativity and imagination.
Black: Black is often associated with sophistication and independence.

One method for choosing your color palette is to select colors that represent the values you embody. For example, if you’re a fun-loving brand that caters to energetic extroverts, you may want to pair shades of orange and yellow. If you’re a quietly luxurious brand that caters to serious, art-loving types, black with a purple accent may be right for you. That being said, you don’t necessarily want to choose a palette based solely on color psychology. You’ll also want to consider your target audience and the other brands your customers shop frequently. You’ll want to examine your competitors and consider the colors they’re using. Finally, you’ll want to consider what intuitively feels right for your brand. If you’re a solopreneur owner of a jewelry brand, you’ll definitely want to choose a color palette that resonates with you on a personal level.

Several digital tools exist to help you select a color palette, if you don’t know where to start. One of my favorites is Adobe Color, which features a color wheel and color palette generator. With the tool, you can move five pins around a color wheel to see how those colors look together. You can also apply a color harmony rule like “analogous”, “monochromatic”, or “complementary” to ensure that you’re following the best practices for color matching, if you’re nervous about breaking the “rules”. One of the most exciting features of the Adobe Color tool is that you can upload a photo that you like, and it will extract the main colors for you – so your entire color palette can be derived from a single inspiration photo. When you find a color palette you like, you can save it to your library for reference.

One important thing to remember about color in marketing is to know how colors are communicated and shared. Web-safe colors – or colors used for websites – are designated by a hex code, a code that consists of six letters and numbers preceded by a hashtag. You’ll also need to know the difference between RGB and CMYK colors. RGB colors are colors that are optimized for viewing on electronic displays like LCD computer monitors and digital cameras. CMYK refers to colors that can be used for printed materials. If your jewelry brand has a website, digital marketing materials, and printed marketing materials, then you’ll need to know the hex, RGB, and CMYK color identifiers for the colors in your color palette. A skilled graphic designer can help you with this.

To add an extra layer of complexity, color also plays an important role in ecommerce, since certain colors can encourage or discourage shopping behaviors. According to an article from Ecommerce Nation, the color red is often associated with urgency, so it can be used on an ecommerce site to promote a sale or limited-time offer. Orange can make a consumer feel confident, so it can be a great choice for call-to-action buttons. Of course, if these colors aren’t part of your brand identity then you won’t want to randomly use them on your ecommerce site. However, your knowledge about these colors can help you make better decisions related to ecommerce user experience.

Choosing colors is not an easy process, and it’s best left to a graphic designer or branding expert, who can help you select the perfection combination of colors for your brand. You’ll be committing to your brand’s color palette for the long term, so it shouldn’t be based on trends or passing fancies. What are some brand color palettes that you admire? How do you use color for your brand?

Links mentioned at the beginning of this episode:

“Ecommerce Product Page SEO: 20 Dos & Don’ts”

“Etsy CEO calls this is the ‘perfect moment’ to invest in marketing”

“Facebook Looks to Promote Small Businesses in the Lead-Up to the Holidays [Infographic]“