Lesson 7: You only have 3 seconds

Use color to establish your brand and grab attention

You only get 3 seconds to grab someone’s attention with your advertising, and sometimes less. Three seconds, it’s all you get.

Color is one of the best ways to grab attention. Color is incredibly valuable in your marketing so make sure you’re consistent with your colors and that you have a color that will grab people’s attention, be part of your brand and become something important. So studies have shown that 90% of that decision-making process comes down to color. Just the color!

Each of these brands has a color, and I want you to think about the color that comes to mind when I mention the brand. Home Depot, Lowe’s, Chick-Fil-A, Amazon, McDonald’s, and Facebook. Each of those brands has a logo and a color that came to mind when I mentioned them.

Home Depot’s orange, Lowes is Blue, and Chick-fil-A is red. Amazon had the orange smile for so long, and recently they’ve kind of switched and become a light blue where the smile with the arrow on it is white. They are adjusting their brand as we speak to a different color. McDonald’s golden arches, right? Yellow and red. And then Facebook the blue logo with the F in it is probably what you thought of. Color increases recognition by 80%. So being consistent in your colors is important.

Some other interesting facts regarding color is analyzing the logos of companies on the Forbes list. This is what was found in a study, of the most valuable brands in the world, the logo factory, found that 35% of them use blue as their color. 30% use red. 23 3% are grayscale, or black and white, or don’t have a scheme. Think of Apple, the Apple symbol is usually silver or white. It used to be rainbow colors back in the day, but nowadays it’s silver or white. 20% feature yellow or gold. Only 7% are green and only 3% are purple. The variety is pretty narrow. We see three or four color schemes predominantly, in most of the logos.

Color is super important. And when you see that Home Depot you know exactly who you’re dealing with. You know what it is. Instantly what comes to mind is home goods, tools, equipment, power tools, and all of those kinds of things. So the color is very valuable and it increases memory, it increases retention. It increases retention by 80% if you use the same color over and over. So pick your colors, pick ’em carefully, and then stick with them. Utilize that in all of your branding material and it’ll benefit you many times over. That is lesson 7.