Close your eyes and think of a technology company. A financial institution. A healthcare brand. A social media platform. An airline. A consulting firm. A software company. A bank. A pharmaceutical giant.
Now open your eyes and ask yourself: what color were they?
You already know the answer. It was blue. It was always going to be blue. The six-figure branding engagement, the workshop with stakeholders, the three rounds of presentations, the color psychology rationale in the deck — all of it was always going to end in blue. The journey was just the scenic route to the inevitable destination.
This is not a coincidence. This is not a collective aesthetic preference. This is a system, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The Blue Tax: What It Costs to Be Safe
Blue communicates trust. Reliability. Professionalism. Competence. This is real — the research broadly supports it. Blue has lower arousal properties than red or orange, meaning it doesn’t spike anxiety, which is useful if you’re a bank asking people to hand over their money or a hospital asking people to hand over their health.
But here’s the problem: when everything communicates trust, nothing does.
Blue has become the visual equivalent of saying “we’re committed to excellence.” It’s technically true of someone, somewhere. As a differentiator, it’s worthless. When Pepsi is blue and PayPal is blue and Ford is blue and Dell is blue and Facebook is blue and Samsung is blue and American Express is blue, “blue” no longer means “trustworthy.” It means “I didn’t want to make a decision.”
The blue tax is real and it compounds. Every new blue brand makes every other blue brand slightly more invisible. You’re not choosing the color of trust. You’re choosing the color of camouflage.
The Approval Committee and the Color of Least Resistance
Here’s where it gets structurally interesting. Most brand color decisions are not made by one person with a vision. They’re made by a committee with a budget.
Committees have a predictable relationship with risk. Individual committee members may personally love the deep rust orange that the agency proposed. They may privately agree that it’s distinctive, modern, and absolutely right for the brand. But then comes the moment when they have to say so out loud, in front of colleagues, and defend it to a CFO who is already skeptical of the entire branding investment.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing blue.
This is the fundamental dynamic. Bold color choices require someone to stick their neck out. Blue requires nothing. Blue is the color of institutional cover. If the rebrand fails, nobody can point to the color and say “this was a catastrophic creative mistake.” Blue is defensible. Blue is safe. Blue is the beige of the chromatic spectrum.
The agency often knows this. Some agencies have stopped fighting it. They present the bold options — the terracotta, the forest green, the unexpected yellow — because the brief asks for differentiation. They watch the committee squirm. And then they present the blue option, which they had prepared in advance, because they’ve done this before.
The Brands That Weren’t Blue (And What It Cost Them)
The brands that have genuinely built equity through unexpected color choices did so because someone, at some point, was willing to defend a decision that made a room uncomfortable.
Tiffany didn’t invent its blue accidentally — but it’s a very specific, trademarked, aggressively protected blue that functions as a completely different asset than “generic brand blue.” Hermès orange is one of the most recognizable colors in luxury. The red of a Coca-Cola can. The yellow of McDonald’s arches. The purple of Cadbury. The green of Starbucks.
What these colors have in common is not that they’re “better” colors. It’s that they were owned. Consistently. Aggressively. For decades. Color equity is built through commitment, not through choosing the statistically safest hue.
The irony is that choosing blue in hopes of conveying trustworthiness actually conveys nothing — because you blend into the blue ocean (pun very much intended) of every other brand that made the same calculation. The brands that actually feel trustworthy often feel that way because of consistency and specificity, not because they chose the right side of the color wheel.
A Modest Proposal for Your Next Rebrand
This is not a call to make every logo aggressively experimental. Not everything needs to be a chaotic gradient or a color that doesn’t technically exist in nature. Some brands should probably be blue. Surgeons’ scrubs are blue for a reason.
But before you land on blue, ask yourself one honest question: are we choosing this because it’s right for us, or because it’s safe for the room?
If the answer is the latter — if you’re choosing blue because nobody can get in trouble for choosing blue — then you’re not making a brand decision. You’re making a political decision dressed up as a brand decision. And you’ll spend the next decade wondering why nobody can tell you apart from your competitors.
The creative process demands more than that. Your audience deserves more than that. And frankly, the agency you hired deserves the chance to show you something they actually believe in.
Be brave enough to pick a color that makes the CFO slightly uncomfortable. That discomfort might be the most valuable thing in the room.
Speaking of things that make corporate rooms uncomfortable: the NoBriefs shop stocks a selection of items for the creatives who’ve been in one too many color approval meetings. The Fuck The Brief collection understands your pain at a cellular level.
You’re allowed to choose something other than blue. This has always been true.
