If you’re starting a business or are in the midst of marketing one you’ve no doubt thought about branding. The powers that be typically agonize over brand language, logos, taglines, and the like and are typically willing to work until they get the branding just right.

But when it comes to brand colors, says marketing strategist Angela Coulter, some of her clients get downright emotional at the thought of changing them because they’re so caught up with what the colors mean to them personally.

Big mistake.

Getting emotional about your color choice is what your customer ought to be doing, not you.

“When you think about your target customer,” says Coulter, “think, ‘How do I want them to feel about my company, product, and/or service?’ Then look at your logo and the colors you use – on your product label, business card, Website, brochures, presentations, handouts, and anything else that a prospective or existing client would see – and see if they match that expectation.”

Her color guidelines may begin to sound familiar if you’ve heard institutional psychologists talk about how certain wall colors may evoke more calming or aggressive responses or trigger certain feelings, and if you think about it you know there’s truth to it.

Coulter notes that there are both psychological and cultural associations people tend to make with certain colors. For instance, she notes that psychologically, people tend to see blues as cool and calming and that culturally the color “can represent peace” or “keeping bad spirits or evil away.” Red, on the other hand, makes people want to “take action/take notice,” among other things. Culturally, red can be associated with power or danger  –  but here’s where you want to be careful, especially if you’re marketing your products overseas  – in China, red evokes feelings of purity and joy.

So if you’re really attached to your brand colors, now might be a good time to ask yourself why.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The term productivity app needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Consider the productivity king of the Microsoft Office suite, Excel. Seldom does an application come along that permits you to do more than this program. Problem is, once you get sucked in to perfecting an Excel spreadsheet, you can spend the better part of an hour or two noodling with formulas, fields, and formatting. Now, is that productive? Many times, no, because sometimes the more variables you have at your disposal, the more tempting it is to change them for fun.

Next, consider solitaire. Not a productivity app per se, but if the guy down the hall who’s always immersed in a hand is the one coming up with the great ideas, maybe he’s on to something.

Sort of splitting the difference between a spreadsheet app and a flat-out game, Internet Anagram Server takes any word or phrase you enter and rearranges the letters to form new words. How is that productive? Say you’re trying to come up with a meaningful name for your new company, and you want it to incorporate the names of your darling children, Lisa and Hector.  Enter those names, and instantly 230 alternatives appear. Scanning the list, you see options like “Its Cholera” and “Roach Tiles.” Probably not viable picks. But then you scan the list further and the choices get better: “Toil Search,” “Oracle Hits,” and “Last Heroic.”Let’s say you pick one of those three. You can decide to let the derivation of the name be your little secret. Or, you can market it for all it’s worth by telling your investors and customers that your company name is an amalgam of your kids’ names. It may not get you all your funding, but it’s a great story that will become part of your brand.

By the way, one possible anagram of with beans = new habits.  We’re just saying.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons