Color Psychology

Have you been paying enough attention to the implementation of colors when designing and approving advertisements or branding logos? Color is an extremely valuable element and cannot be ignored. Understanding your brand and the colors that make it stand out should not be taken lightly, it should be one of the main factors taken into consideration.

Studies have shown that warm colors such as orange, yellow, and red are known to stimulate excitement. They also tend to generate activity; hence, they are great for offices. If you pay attention to detail, you would notice that kid’s packages usually have one or more of these colors, in order to imply speed and efficiency. Take McDonald’s for instance, the colors of the arc of McDonald’s did not come by chance, the people behind the brand’s logo and color choice have thought and studied the colors to create the best synergy for the brand’s personality.

Take skin care products as another example, most packaging for women products, especially night creams and skin care products, are usually wrapped up with light green or light blue; colors that help to create a soothing and relaxing feeling.

Fine dining restaurants often go for warm colors such as burgundy and burnt orange; these colors promote longevity and often open one’s appetite for food, increasing the chances of customers ordering additional treats!

However, it’s important to also note that just because a certain color is associated with a certain feeling or mood, does not mean the color should be extensively painted on every wall. Overwhelming people with a certain color can have counterproductive effects. For example, grey can add a rock solid feeling to a brand; however, too much of it, and people will feel mostly nothing, which isn’t a sentiment you’d want people associating with your brand.

These examples only highlight the fundamentals of color psychology. Any good designer should understand these basics and apply them to their daily work. Each and every color has its own uses and target market; we just need to know what goes where.

LinkedIn Acquires SlideShare!

Looks like it’s the new trend! Facebook acquires Instagram for US$1 billion and LinkedIn acquires SlideShare for US$118.75!

If you don’t know what SlideShare is, it’s a presentation sharing website. SlideShare allows users to upload presentations publicly or privately – upon their choice. Those presentations can then be embedded onto blogs, websites, or presentations. They are then shared on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and now LinkedIn. You can have a better of how it works visiting the website itselfhttp://www.slideshare.net/

SlideShare users have uploaded more than 9 million presentations. In March of this year 2012, SlideShare had nearly 29 million unique visitors. Besides presentations, SlideShare also hosts documents, PDFs, videos, and webinars.

The purchase price is a combination of approximately 45 percent in cash and 55 percent in stock, according to LinkedIn. If everything goes according to plan, the acquisition will close during the second quarter.

The potential for synergy between SlideShare and LinkedIn is almost innate, almost better than Facebook and Instagram and one has to wonder what sort of large plans are in store for the future.

This has got me thinking though, what could twitter possibly acquire? Any ideas?

General Motors, Facebook and IPO

Have you heard that General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising with Facebook?

GM announced that paid ads on Facebook have ‘Little impact on consumers’. The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products.

On Friday the 18^th, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering (IPO) that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion. This to me highlights questions such as why would GM do that right before the IPO? People who were interested in this issue were wondering why they haven’t seen any GM ads on Facebook.

How come GM didn’t showcase their story? This is what I think… Social media starts with strategy, and ends with strategy. You can never blame a medium for the failure of your objective. If you had as little as 10 dollars and want to reach your objective whether through social media or traditional media, then YOU WILL. It all goes down to this, an equipped team that is professional enough to understand the brand and understand how to communicate it across. Facebook advertising gives you the benefit of targeting the exact audience.

From a social media specialist point of view, Facebook advertising is more precise to reach the audience needed than any other social media platform, and definitely more accurate than traditional media. At the end of the day and as we get close to the IPO of Facebook, if companies are trying to teach Facebook a lesson by publishing stories that have no proper leads and evidence then they are only hurting their own reputation. It is important for companies to think first and foremost about their reputation before pointing the finger on an intangible medium.