The best brand colour is the one you stop noticing

Ask five business owners how they picked their brand colour and four of them will tell you a story about themselves: a favourite team jersey, a childhood bedroom, a colour that felt like "them." That is exactly the wrong question to be answering.

A brand colour is not a personal preference, it is a repeated signal. Its whole job is to show up in the same place often enough that people stop consciously registering it and start recognising it instead, the way you recognise a friend’s silhouette before you see their face.

Which means the best brand colour is rarely the most exciting one in the room. Exciting fades. Boring, repeated relentlessly, becomes unmistakable. Sterling Products did not build a country-wide reputation on that green because it was thrilling. They built it because they were willing to paint it on every truck, every crate, every shop sign, for decades, without ever changing their mind.

So choose the colour you can commit to being bored by. That boredom, held for years, is what everyone else ends up calling a brand.