If you've decided to complement your marketing campaign with high-quality promotional products, you've joined the ranks of millions of businesses utilizing giveaways to increase their company reach. You may have even chosen the promotional product that best suits your business or industry out of the more than 4,000 corporate gifts available from Blueberry Ink, so now it's time to send in your artwork and have those products expertly printed.
At this point in your business, you have already determined that branding is one of the most important aspects of growing your business. In a recent study done by the University of Loyola, Maryland, choosing the right color for your brand can increase sales and ideas more effectively by 50 to 85 percent. Once established, color was also shown to increase brand recognition by 87 percent, making it the top factor in brand recognition.
INC Market Research Reporter, Eric Markowitz, wrote an article discussing the successes and failures of products based on color alone, including Heinz Ketchup, which sold seven million units of green ketchup over seven months, and Crystal Pepsi, which flopped because people couldn't get past their soda being clear. He goes on to discuss that case studies have shown that a consumer's decision to purchase products can range from anywhere between 60 and 80 percent based on the product's color.
Logo colors play a major role in brand recognition, which is why you can instantly recognize the shopping apps on your phone and find your favorite restaurant from a few blocks away. At Blueberry Ink, we operate with the Pantone Matching System ® (PMS) to ensure that the colors used on each promotional product are an exact match to the color you have chosen for your brand and can therefore increase brand recognition for your business.
What is the Pantone Matching System® ?
PMS is a widely used color matching system utilized in the printing industry to bring out the best representation of color intent in graphic arts. It consists of thousands of pre-formulated colors to produce specific spot colors for products and designs. This system is designed so that you will get an exact match to your chosen color swatch since Pantone has developed its own unique ink mixing formula and your promotional products company is hand-mixing that formula to get the exact color using Pantone's quality inks. The solid color inks are then applied individually through the printing process, a method called spot or offset printing.
Why Do We Use the Pantone Matching System®?
The PMS is used so that your brand colors are a true match, whether you are printing on padfolios, business gifts, letterhead, or drinkware. Your blue will always be the right blue, not a shade lighter or a bit greener. Other color models have a variation of color from one product to the next, or from one printer to the next. The CMYK color model is a process printing that uses four color inks. Those colors are cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black), which compared to Pantone's 13 base pigments (14 with black), is low. In fact, only 55 percent of CMYK colors match the PMS colors, which leaves a lot room for error in printing quality. Another process printing method is called CMYK-OGV, or Extended Gamut printing, and it expands on CMYK by adding orange, green, and violet to the color range. CMYK-OGV has 90 percent better PMS matches than CMYK, but there is still room for error in color printing.
Blueberry Ink's mission is to provide high-quality corporate gifts and promotional products to every business, and since the PMS colors are standardized, we can provide a high-quality name or logo every time.
Can't I Just Match My Logo Colors to the Pantone Colors on My Computer Screen?
There is a full list of Pantone colors on the internet, but computer screens operate from an RGB display and are often not calibrated well to properly show exact colors. Hex codes for website colors are also not comparable to Pantone colors either. Both RGB and Hex colors are only estimates and do not have a direct correlation to Pantone colors.
How Can I Find My Proper Pantone Colors?
Pantone provides guides and books so you can have color swatches available to match your brand's primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. These physical color swatch books are available online or in art supply stores and will ensure you will get the actual PMS color you need on any promotional materials.
Pantone also uses special codes to refer to the type of paper in which the color swatch is printed. The letter C means the color is printed on coated paper for a glossy finish, while the letter U is printed on uncoated paper. Blueberry Ink uses Pantone colors with the letter C since it is widely used for sharp and complex designs and prevents bleeding.
The Pantone Matching System® ensures a high-quality business name or logo every time and since colors can change depending on the material used for each product, our experienced team will get the best possible match each and every time and then expertly place your brand name on each product to get the best results.
Contact us if you're looking for high quality corporate gifts or promotional items to increase sales and brand recognition, or provide your employees with great company swag bags.
