What research actually says about color in logo design
Branding advice is full of confident claims about color psychology. But most of them don't hold up under scrutiny.
The myth
"Color increases brand recognition by 80%, according to a study from the University of Loyola, Maryland" is the most quoted line in the industry. You'll find it on hundreds of branding sites, in patent filings, and even in trademark law articles.
Here's the problem: that study DOESN'T EXIST. Not one source that cites it links to an actual publication, an author, a year, or a journal. Print industry journalist Eddy Hagen spent years searching for the original source and wrote it up in 2019. The trail led to a 2005 Xerox marketing leaflet, where the number had been attached to a researcher named Dr. Ellen Hoadley. Hagen reached out to her directly. She turned out to be a real, now-emerita professor, and sent him her two actual papers, from 1990 and 2000. Neither one contained the 80% figure at all. Both were about how color improves how people process information in office documents and charts, nothing to do with brand recognition. The real research exists. Somewhere along the way, a marketing leaflet ripped the finding out of context and swapped the topic entirely. Hagen closed his piece with a simple rule: "check the references, check the original paper and the research setup."
A similar case is the "62-90% of purchase decisions are based on color alone" claim (usually attributed to a "CCICOLOR Institute"). It circulates everywhere, but tracing it back to an actual study with a methodology and a sample size is impossible, even modern AI search tools hit a dead end trying to find it.
What's actually been tested
Here are three studies you can find, read, and check yourself.
A 2025 study in Psychology & Marketing tested how the lightness of a logo's color shapes perceived brand age. Darker logos were perceived as older and more established, lighter ones as younger. The effect held consistently across their experiments, though it wasn't a rigid rule: a brand leaning into tradition gained from darker, heavier tones, while a brand positioning as modern did better going lighter.
Two marketing professors at MBS School of Business published a piece in Harvard Business Review with an important caveat: color never works in a vacuum. Background, framing, and the surrounding design change how the same color reads. Red on white feels alive. The same red on black feels aggressive.
An even more surprising study, published in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, ran six experiments with over 2,000 participants and found that black-and-white logos read as higher status than color ones. Researchers tie this to a sense of artistic restraint that fades once a brand is already well known, meaning the effect matters more for a first impression than for an established brand.
What to do with all this
Interestingly, the luxury industry's shift toward black-and-white logos (Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein) happened before this study came out. Whether that's directly connected or just a broader minimalism trend is hard to say.
What a color signals depends on saturation and context. But there's one factor no study accounts for: personal taste. Someone loves purple, someone can't stand it. If a person dislikes your brand's color, no amount of "depth and expertise" psychology will change their mind. People are too different for universally "right" colors to exist. Color psychology is a useful tool, but you can't please everyone.