Can Pantone Colors Drive Online Sales?

Adopting retail and societal trends can keep your brand fresh and relevant. Some fads are short-lived, lasting just days or months. Others might stick around for years.

Here are three trends that inspire consumers to buy.

3 Trends to Drive Sales

Pantone’s color of the year. Since the 1950s, the Pantone Matching System has been the standard for color management of digital and physical products. Designers, manufacturers, and printers rely on the system to ensure consistent output of color.

Today, social media influencers inject proprietary colors into more traditional products and paints using Pantone’s method. Since 2000, the Pantone color of the year has helped guide brands on the production of exclusive goods.

For example, in 2020 luxury brand TeaLeaves concocted a tea that produces Pantone’s Classic Blue when steeped. And Uncommon Goods sells stools that mimic Pantone’s colors and block design.

TeaLeaves, at left, produced a tea that turns Pantone Classic Blue when steeped. Uncommon Goods sells stools that mimic Pantone’s colors and block design.

Brands sometimes enter licensing agreements with Pantone. Otherwise, “inspired by” landing pages can help ecommerce sites embrace color trends. Etsy features a massive collection of Pantone-inspired goods. Fashion merchant Unique Vintage showcases products that match Pantone’s annual color.

Unique Vintage showcases its Pantone-inspired apparel.

Options to utilize Pantone’s colors include:

• Adding splashes of the annual color to the website. Pantone’s yearly picks evoke emotion and are recognizable.

• Injecting the color into the site’s navigation. Modern and simple website designs adapt well to changeable colors for the navigation bar, calls-to-action (such as add-to-cart and checkout buttons), and hyperlinks.

• Adding “compare to” or “inspired by” icons with links to a relevant article or blog post.

• Curating customer photos featuring the use of the color.

Mobile payment apps. The use of mobile payment apps is on the rise. Among the most popular are Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. More are emerging.

These mobile apps use tokenization, which encrypts credit card info and replaces it with a randomly generated number. Tokenized platforms are more secure than traditional payment methods and thus appeal to knowledgeable consumers.

Mobile payment apps are also more convenient for shoppers as they avoid having to type a credit card number for every transaction. For example, when selecting Apple Pay at checkout on a desktop browser, the customer merely approves the transaction via Face ID on an iPhone or iPad or via a double-tap an Apple Watch’s side button.

Promote your mobile payments partners on the home page, in the footer of every page, and throughout the website.

Health and well-being. To pinpoint a consumer priority, look at trends in the health and well-being sector. During 2020, millions of people focused on home and cooking. Many families sought to eat dinner together more often.

How your prospects respond to health trends influences what they buy. Thus consider multiple uses for certain product lines and adjust messaging and context-of-use images accordingly.

For example, a store selling gardening supplies could include info on gardening’s health benefits and show people using the products. A beauty retailer could feature a picture of a woman applying mascara as she heads into the gym, with a caption, “Withstands your workout.”

Relevant Trends?

Think outside the box when considering which trends affect your business. Take a cue from KitchenAid, which combines stability and usefulness with design. KitchenAid continues to amaze consumers in features and colors and modifies its messaging to address the current climate.

KitchenAid’s business model includes trending colors that evoke emotion.

In short, incorporate widespread trends that evoke emotion. They comfort consumers and solidify your store as a go-to shop.