13 tips to help when choosing packaging colours

Any packaging designer, brand manager, and creative professional knows that colour can play a huge role in a brand’s popularity. What is less well known is the similar impact that careful choice of packaging colours can have.

Wisely choosing packaging colours can significantly impact your business’s success. But it is critical to assess various factors. Points worth considering include colour psychology, consumer and cultural preferences, accurately reflecting your brand values and positioning, and differentiating yourself from competitors.

Selecting the right hues for your retail packaging can help to capture attention. It can delight customers when “unboxing” their eCommerce orders. It can help foster brand loyalty. It can even help brand recognition as your transit packaging travels through supply chains.

Due to this often-overlooked importance, this guide provides several tips when selecting the right packaging colour for your business and brand. It covers:

• An overview of the technical aspects of colour choices/psychology.
• Why colour choice is so important.
• A collection of tips and factors to consider when choosing packaging colours.

Please use the table of contents to go straight to your area of interest or continue reading for further details.

So, without further ado, here are the 13 key considerations when selecting the colour of your packaging:

• Stick to core brand colours.
• Consider your brand positioning.
• Consider product positioning.
• Communicate purpose and personality through colour.
• Represent your product.
• Know your customer.
• Consider age / sex of target consumers.
• Use colours to invoke emotions.
• Consider cultural preferences.
• Stand apart from your competition.
• Consider material colours.
• Consider minimalism.
• Maintain consistency with design and font.

The rest of this article addresses each of these, including how you can apply them to your own business.

Perhaps most obviously, it is essential that your packaging reflects your existing brand identity. Even if you explore the possibility of incorporating different colours to denote varying product ranges, or to target other consumer groups, some use of your brand colours should remain visible.

Both existing and new customers should be able to recognise your brand through your packaging. They expect a consistent appearance across physical retail, online shops and websites, and packaging and products you supply.

Using colour psychology to select colours for your packaging (and indeed brand) can be a sensible strategy. However, businesses must ensure that the shades chosen accurately reflect their brand values and positioning.

For example, if you want to offer a premium product and target higher-value consumers, the packaging must reflect that. Even if you feel that your brand should convey trust, for example, using a blue when targeting premium segments could be a mistake (and you should consider white or black, for example).

Colour choice should also allow you to tie in with your existing brand colours and identity (unless you are looking to break into new markets – which may require additional considerations).

Within your brand and product portfolio, you may have (and in some cases are likely) to have products targeting different price points and consumers.

Colour can be an excellent way to differentiate these ranges. However, care is required to allow consistency and the message you want to communicate about your products. Is a specific product representing value? Are others at the premium end of the scale? Are any related to eco-friendly lines or fun options for a particular segment?

Careful consideration should not just go into brand colours, but for individual ranges as well.

However, a common pitfall is a packaging colour that provides the desired messaging and positioning but confuses the customer.

A prime example would be using colours that are not associated with a specific flavour or variation of a product. For instance, orange-flavoured or scented products in green or purple packaging would not represent your product accurately.

Similarly, not using greens to portray an environmentally friendly product/packaging (when it is not) is important. This form of greenwashing could potentially alienate customers who would otherwise have been happy to purchase from your business.

It is also important to remember that colours can have cultural meanings attached to them. The implications of different colours are fundamental when launching products into new markets or shipping internationally.

You must consider culture and heritage when creating packaging for specific regions or if you have strong sales in a particular country. An oft-cited example is that the colour red represents good luck in China.

Choosing colours for your packaging that elicit a specific emotion or feeling amongst your ideal consumer can be a clever strategy. But what if all your competitors are doing this too?

Sometimes, it can be hard to differentiate between products and packaging on a shelf as they are all optimised to the same criteria.

It can often be worth taking a risk and seeing if you can position your brand apart from competitors in these circumstances. At the very least, using a colour outside the norm (if you are the only one doing it) can allow you to stand out, capture more attention, and become more memorable than your competitors.

When working with corrugated packaging, in particular, the colour of the material used in its manufacture can also have a surprisingly significant impact on how your packaging, products and brand are perceived.

Many businesses now use kraft material with green and white inks to create a natural, environmentally friendly message. Alternatively, white materials (and those using clay coat liners or specialist surface coating to provide a “sheen”) are ideal for more premium offerings.

How the colour of the material used for your packaging combines with your chosen print colours is becoming increasingly important.

As with consideration of material colours, many businesses are pivoting towards minimalism.

While not using many colours or print coverage, minimal design can create a premium “less is more” approach. Minimalism can work surprisingly well with corrugated packaging and can be in stark contrast to competitors using multiple colours.

A step and repeat pattern is another strong option for creating an impactful appearance using a single or very few colours.

The final point to consider is that all elements of your packaging design should work together., It is no use using colours to provide a premium appearance and then ruining this with a font that appears cheap and cheerful (or, similarly, using cartoon-esque graphics or icons too).

Similarly, classy fonts (typically using serif designs), used with bright colours, can look jarring and out of place.

The fonts, icons and graphics also send a message to customers. Making sure all design elements are pulling in the same direction is crucial.