It's not all about the owner...

It has been brought to my attention on a couple of occasions recently that some small business owners are missing a trick when designing visual marketing material because they forget who they are designing it for. The conversation with clients when taking an initial brief tends to go something along the lines of –

Me – So have you thought about the colour scheme?

Client – Yes, we have decided to go with pink and purple

Me – Ok, what’s the reason behind those colours?

Client – Well I really like pink and purple

This is where the problem lies, I can appreciate that business owners want their business to reflect what they like but at the end of the day they are not trying to attract themselves to buy, they are actually trying to get the outside world to buy.

Often their target audience may not be attracted to the colour choice of the owners or it may reflect the wrong values, after all if your target market is males over the age of 65 then pink and purple are not going to give of the right image even if the owner loves them!

Colours have different perceptions behind them and people associate different traits to different colours, for example recent surveys suggest black to be associated with luxury and exclusivity where as blue is thought to be related to loyalty and trust. You therefore need to think about how you want to be perceived and more importantly what your prospective clients are looking for.

What I am trying to get at is you should be thinking from the customers perspective at all times when dealing with the visual image of your business, remember it’s not about what you like, its about what your target audience will be interested in, this goes for not only colours but also with images, fonts, content, style and more.