"Blue builds trust. Red creates urgency. Green means growth." You've seen this infographic. It's been shared approximately forty billion times on LinkedIn. And it's mostly garbage.
The Infographic Problem
Somewhere in the mid-2000s, someone made a color psychology infographic that went viral. It assigned emotions to colors with the confidence of a horoscope and the rigor of a fortune cookie. Blue = trust. Yellow = optimism. Purple = luxury.
Branding agencies loved it because it gave them pseudoscientific justification for subjective decisions. "We chose blue because research shows it builds trust." What research? A study of 30 college students in 2004 who were shown colored squares for 200 milliseconds? Cool.
Here's the problem: if blue "builds trust," why do both Facebook and the police use it? Do you trust both of those equally? If red "creates urgency," why is it used by both Coca-Cola (relaxation, nostalgia, happiness) and the Red Cross (emergency, aid)? The theory falls apart the moment you apply it to the real world.
What the Actual Research Says
There *is* legitimate research on color and psychology. And it says something much less sexy than the infographics suggest:
Context matters more than color. The same color triggers different responses depending on the product category, the cultural context, and the surrounding design elements. Red on a clearance tag feels urgent. Red on a Cartier box feels luxurious. Same color. Completely different meaning.
Appropriateness matters most. A study in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science found that the most important factor in color choice is "perceived appropriateness" — whether the color *feels right* for the brand. Not whether it triggers a universal emotion, because it doesn't.
Personal preference and experience dominate. Your audience's cultural background, personal associations, and prior experiences with colors far outweigh any supposed universal meaning. Blue might remind your customer of a brand they love — or a hospital they hated.
What Actually Drives Effective Color Decisions
Forget the psychology charts. Here's what actually matters when choosing brand colors:
1. Competitive Differentiation
The most practical reason to choose a color is that your competitors didn't. Map your competitive landscape. What colors dominate? Go somewhere else.
When every fintech startup chose blue (because "trust"), the ones that stood out chose unexpected colors. Robinhood chose green. Stripe chose purple-indigo. Chime chose bright green. They didn't pick these colors because of psychology. They picked them because they were *different*.
2. Functional Legibility
Colors need to work. Dark text on light backgrounds. Sufficient contrast for accessibility. Readable on screens and in print. Visible in small sizes and large. These functional requirements eliminate more options than any psychology theory.
Your gorgeous dusty rose might test beautifully on a mood board and be completely illegible as body text on a white background. Function first.
3. System Flexibility
A brand color isn't one color — it's a system. You need:
- A primary that's distinctive and ownable
- Neutrals that let content breathe
- Accents that create hierarchy and draw attention
- Dark and light variants for different contexts
The best brand color systems are built for flexibility, not for emotional triggers.
4. Cultural Awareness
If your brand operates globally, color associations vary dramatically by culture. White signals purity in Western cultures and mourning in many Eastern ones. Red means luck in China and danger in the US. Do your homework for your specific audience, not the generic infographic version.
5. Gut Instinct (Seriously)
After you've done the competitive analysis, checked the functional requirements, and built the system — there's a legitimate role for instinct. Does the color *feel like your brand*? Does it match the personality you're building? This subjective assessment is more valuable than any pseudo-scientific color chart.
A Better Process
Here's how we actually choose brand colors at Unbothered:
1. Audit competitors. Map every color in the space. Find the gaps.
2. Define brand personality. Not "what emotion does blue trigger" but "who is this brand as a person?"
3. Explore broadly. Generate 20-30 palette options. Don't self-edit too early.
4. Test functionally. Apply top candidates to real use cases — website, social, print, product UI. Kill anything that doesn't work at every size and context.
5. Narrow by instinct. From the survivors, pick the one that *feels* most like the brand you're building.
The Takeaway
Stop letting a LinkedIn infographic drive your brand's most visible design decision. Color psychology is a cocktail party factoid, not a design strategy.
Pick colors that differentiate you, work everywhere, and feel right. That's it. That's the whole secret.