Holi: The celebration of colorful and positive social energy

This is a special edition of our newsletter dedicated to the festival of colors: Holi. The world around us looks so beautiful when men, women and children beam out their joyous energy, while being draped in a multitude of amazing colors.

Colors define our mood and have the powerful ability to stimulate our emotions. Our societal upbringing is woven around a colorful fabric as we react to colors as per our inbuilt perception. A beaming red traffic light signal puts vehicles to a halt on the road, similarly in real lives we often associate the color red with danger or a sign of caution. On a similar note, as we find peace in the lap of mother nature through the greenery around us, the color green invokes feelings of prosperity and growth.

Such is the dominance of colors in our everyday life that we even go to the extent of denoting a happy and cheerful ambience as a colorful one and the one lacking the same as dull and boring.

VIBGYOR: The colorful Jargon taught at Schools.

I cannot not resist from sharing a related personal story, which dates back to my childhood. At a young age in school, I was introduced to the most complex term I ever came across, which was a seven letter acronym : VIBGYOR. The term was a simplified method to denote the seven colors appearing in a rainbow. I memorized (read mugged) the names of the seven colors appearing in the rainbow. Unlike most other terms, I always remembered those seven beautiful colors due to multiple beautiful encounters with rainbows created by mother nature. It would not be incorrect to say that the sheer beauty of the mesmerizing colors in the rainbow helped me remember the constituent colors and the rainbow is amongst the most renowned spectacles in Nature.

Do Colors provide unique brand identity in business?

After a nostalgic detour, let’s get back to business :-). Similar to our everyday lives, even in business colors play a substantial role as they are capable of evoking emotions and influence our behavior and thoughts. Colors are also beneficial in the business world as a great business cannot be built without generating the demand for their manufactured products.

Hence organizations spend a lot of time and effort to carve out a durable brand identity, formed through a thoughtful design of the color elements underlying the brand’s characteristics. It is pretty interesting to understand how a brand carves out its presence in the consumer’s mind through visual signals sent out by its brand story.

Following are a few examples denoting the essence behind the design elements of some of some of the well-known brands in the Indian industry.

BLINKIT

The color palette for the Indian Quick Commerce App: Blinkit contains yellow as the base color, signifying the brand’s stand for optimism and belief in their mission of transforming the lives of millions of Indians. Yellow also signifies happiness, youth and playfulness.

SWIGGY

The color palette of the food delivery company: Swiggy carries orange as its base color. Orange signifies high energy levels and stands out as friendly and playful. The color also helps the company to improve its visibility as this color can easily stand out in a crowd of people.

ZOMATO

Another major Indian food delivery company: Zomato carries red as its base color. Red Orange signifies importance and can draw attention quite easily. In fact, in a recent interview, Mr. Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Zomato disclosed that the choice of red as the base color for his company was inspired by the Traffic Lights as the color red could easily draw the most attention amongst all colors.

ITC

The logo for the Indian conglomerate: ITC carries dark blue as the base color. The color dark blue signifies trust and reliability. The diversified nature of the business is evident in the logo’s geometrical design and the dark blue color adds to the underlying principles of professionalism and stability.

NYKAA

Nykaa is a leading Indian platform for women cosmetics formed with the vision of celebrating the star in each woman. As the brand strongly stands for empowerment of the female community, the color Pink was chosen to carve out its identity specifically for its prospective customer segment.

Hope that this article could add insightful colors in your life and could help you visualize businesses with a colorful lens.

Happy Holi!