Why Sticking to One Signature Color Can Hold Your Personal Brand Back

You picked your brand color for a reason. Maybe it made you feel powerful, bold, or seen. Yet over time, what once felt like freedom can start to feel like a rule you can’t break, like if you show up in anything but your brand color, people won’t recognize you. By allowing your personal style to evolve, though, you’ll honor the colors that shift your energy and let your presence (rather than your palette) be what people remember about you.

In this episode of The Visibility Shift, we’re rethinking what consistency actually looks like in a personal brand. I’m breaking down why entrepreneurs and speakers don’t need to follow the same color rules as corporate brands and how holding too tightly to one signature color can start to limit you instead of supporting you.

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3:19 – Why corporate color rules don’t translate to personal branding

5:55 – How color shapes energy and mood beyond recognition

7:37 – Color as just one element to your brand story and recognition

10:07 – What consistency really means for a personal brand

11:25 – Why your brand color and your power color aren’t the same

12:53 – Power color as the key to channeling chosen energy with your wardrobe

13:41 – How flexibility in color fosters authenticity and alignment

14:58 – What Michelle Obama’s style evolution teaches about brand congruence

17:16 – Your invitation to redefine color as a story, not a standard

Mentioned In Why Sticking to One Signature Color Can Hold Your Personal Brand Back

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Welcome to The Visibility Shift, the podcast where style becomes your most powerful strategy for being seen, standing out, and leading boldly. I'm Ellie Steinbrink, stylist and personal brand coach, and if you've ever thought, "My style just isn't working anymore," take this as your sign. You're ready for your next level. And instead of launching into a panicked shopping spree, what you really need is a strategy. A style strategy that reflects where you're headed, not who you used to be or who you think you need to be to fit in.

Because when your style aligns with your brand and your vision, everything shifts. You lead with more presence, you attract the right opportunities and clients, and you fully step into the woman you're becoming. Because showing up as yourself, that's the most strategic thing you can do. Now let's get visible.

Welcome back to another episode of The Visibility Shift. One thing I hear from women in my world, which is female entrepreneurs and speakers, all the time is they'll say, "I'm known for pink," or insert whatever color you're known for. I smile every time because I totally get it. At some point, that color probably did really feel powerful.

Maybe it was your first real “I'm stepping out” color after years of wearing corporate black and navies or really not very fun colors. Maybe it made you feel really bold, feminine. Maybe even it was pushing the edge of what you saw other women speakers showing up like, like you were finally letting your fullest self be expressed. But then that “this is my color” slowly becomes the rule. Now it's your "thing". You're almost trapped into wearing this color for every single photo shoot, every event, every keynote. Your website, your social grid needs to look perfectly always pink and on brand.

It's what people have come to expect. It's what you're known for, right? And this is maybe where I think things start to break down. At some point, pink stops feeling like a self-expression and starts feeling like checking a box, maybe. If you're listening, you might think, "Pink is going to be my color forever. I'm seriously never going to tire of it." But maybe some of you out there are wondering, "What if I show up wearing something else? Maybe if I want to wear navy one day or I want to wear some other color, lilac, another color, will people even recognize me, or will they be confused? I can't abandon my brand colors."

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I want to tell you what my perspective of the truth is. You aren't Target. Showing up in a different color doesn't require a whole rebranding campaign. People might not notice the shift in color at all, but if you wear a different color that doesn't align with you, they will notice if your energy feels off. Maybe they won't notice the color shift, but they'll notice an energy shift.

Color as an overall part of your brand strategy is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Honestly, one of the things that triggered it is every night when I'm sitting down watching television, my son will always notice the commercials. He'll be like, “Oh, everything in this commercial is green.” Even if it's not supposed to be green, it's green. The actor’s wearing all green. Everything in the room is green. He's like, “Oh, that means it's this brand.”

Brands do this really purposely. They're training your brain. They know that color creates recognition so that when you see that same green somewhere else, you're going to think of them. You're going to associate that color with them. Honestly, it really works. All the big brands do it—Target, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Cheerios, you name it. They've built billion-dollar businesses around this concept, and color is their shortcut to brand recognition.

I want to draw a line here between a corporate brand, a big-box brand, versus a personal brand. This is where I want to draw the line. Because you are the brand, these same rules don't always apply. Target needs a sea of red because they want people to recognize them as they're driving down the highway as fast as possible. They may never actually interact with their CEO. They need a color to represent them.

But you, on the other hand, as a speaker or the face of, if you're an entrepreneur, you have a voice, you have a story, you have a presence and energy, and there’s nuance to you. People aren’t, conversely, when you think about a corporate brand versus you, people aren't buying from you because of your color palette. They buy from you because of the experience you create, that what I often talk about is inside-out experience. So who you are on the inside reflects on the outside.

Today, I want to dive into this and how we've actually gotten off track a little bit. Honestly, this is a question I get so often: Shouldn't I stick with my brand colors? Isn't that a way to create consistency? And I want to break down why we've believed this in the first place.

Because there is some real strategy and importance around color. But I also want us to give ourselves maybe a slightly different perspective as you're thinking about your own personal brand and what actually creates recognition and resonance with those you're wanting to attract.

But first, let's give credit where credit’s due, all right? Color is powerful. It is the reason why brands have very intentionally picked out their colors. They want to evoke a certain emotion. You think McDonald's—they're red and yellow. They chose that because it has high energy. It makes you feel like you want to move fast. It's appetite-stimulating. All of these things have been tested.

Then you think about colors like green—they can mean fresh, or they can mean sustainable. Purple often is a color that means luxury. Red can often signal confidence or power or even just sexiness, depending on what kind of brand we're talking about here. These colors really do not only evoke an emotion, but they are a differentiator from their competitors.

So if you think about even just in the fast food space, you've got Subway who's green, you've got McDonald's who's yellow, you've got In-N-Out that's red, and so on. That builds recognition. Again, as you're quickly making decisions and trying to process what you're going to have for lunch, those colors are good cues for you. It creates a cohesive identity.

What's really going on is color in corporate branding is about recognition shortcuts—helping people make quick distinctions and decisions. They're scanning the shelves. They're scanning the roadside to see where they want to go to lunch. Stuff is coming across their feed. They need to quickly identify it. It's visual shorthand.

But when you're building a personal brand, you're not sitting on a shelf. You're not trying to flag someone down on the highway. You're not relying on color alone to push your potential clients to a quick decision. I'm not going to sit here and say that color isn't important because, from my entire branding background, I know that having a nice visual aesthetic on your website or a color story perhaps, there's something to be said for that.

But it is just one element that helps portray a bigger story about you. Let's give ourselves permission to let that change. Think about some of your favorite people that are personal brands or entrepreneurs or speakers that are in your inbox or in your world. Do you follow them or do you love them for their color consistency? Or is it the overall vibe that they bring?

I really do see this is where a lot of women who are entrepreneurs or speakers get tripped up. We think, “Well, if that is the rule for corporate branding, if it works for them, it should work for me, so I should apply that. That's a smart marketing decision.” Sometimes it's like we don't know what else to do. Most of us aren't marketing experts, so we just default to what we see the big guys doing or what we see other speakers or entrepreneurs in our space doing.

But again, I just want to circle this, highlight it. Big brands need color to create awareness for the purposes of quick recognition on the shelves or when you're driving down the road a million miles an hour for a lunchtime decision. But you need alignment from the inside out to build trust.

So for a personal brand, your recognition factor isn't a color. Maybe that's part of it, but it is definitely a feeling. What kind of brand personality do you have? And then we think about how we can align your style with that. That isn't always just one color. It's the energy people associate with you, the confidence you exude when you walk in the room, the way your presence shifts the space.

That vibe, that feeling, that energy—that’s really hard to describe. I often say you can just feel that in someone. It’s really difficult to put a needle in it. That is your equivalent of Coca-Cola red. Your audience might not remember the color of your blazer, but they're going to remember how you made them feel. They're going to remember that whatever you were wearing aligned with your energy, and that is more likely what is going to stick.

But it really is easy to get wrapped up in wearing brand colors everywhere we go, isn’t it? It really is. Because I think sometimes, and I'm a perfectionist, sometimes I just want things to be nice and clean and neat and in a little box. So then it turns into wearing your brand color in every photo shoot, your brand color in every keynote, and every Instagram post. Because we really do believe that is what builds consistency and credibility.

But let's make a distinction here, okay? Consistency, when we're talking about personal brands now—I'm not talking about a big corporate brand—consistency isn't doing the same exact thing over and over in terms of our style. So it's not like I always wear this pink dress or I always wear this pink blazer. No, it's alignment. It's authenticity.

So if we think about again, go back to the big brands, if Target showed up in blue tomorrow, yeah, we'd be confused and we'd need to have some campaign about why are we all of a sudden blue here when we know that you're not blue. But if you found yourself wearing pink a lot, but then one day you showed up in blue and it felt like it was in your energy or this outfit aligned with your signature style, your audience wouldn't blink at all. They’d just say, “Oh, that’s so her.”

I also want to make a point of clarity here because when I work with my clients—and you might have heard me talk about it here—about defining a power color, I do think it's worth distinguishing where it can get a little confusing. Because I think we often just associate, especially if you are an entrepreneur or a keynote speaker, we often just assume power color is brand color. They're one and the same. But I want to let you know that they are not.

Think about, let's say you define pink as your power color because it is your brand color. But even think about the color pink, think of all the ways and things you could wear that are pink that even you would say, "Oh, that's not me," or, "Oh, that's me." So think about if pink truly is the one important ruling item in terms of your brand, does a pink pair of Converse give the same feel as a pink shift dress, or a pink tulle skirt give the same feel as a power pink suit? No, right? They're all pink, technically. That means they're all on brand in your color, but they all tell totally different stories.

So again, this is a reminder that color alone isn't your brand story. It's part of it, but it's how you wear it. It's the energy, the way it's styled. That is the difference maker. You see what I'm saying? The spirit of naming a power color when I work with women is all about channeling a certain energy. So I want to get back to the core of what power color means.

When I ask my clients, what is your power color, it's tied to not only it's a color that you love, but it actually changes your energy. There's actually brain science rooted in this. Color has meaning culturally, but it has meaning personally. For someone listening, wearing blue might make you feel like you can conquer anything. For the woman next to you, it might be bright yellow. Or it might be the color that makes you feel more social when you have to go to a networking event.

Hello, I'm raising my hand because I'm an introvert, and I'm just giving a shout out to all the introverts out there. But this color, whatever you name as your power color or colors, can and does shift your energy, shifts your mood, changes how you show up when you get to said event. It's totally normal to have more than just one. It's totally normal for those to not be in alignment with your brand colors because it is you that's changing. It's changing you.

You might have one color, like I'll often talk about, I have a color that I wear, this bright reddish-orange color, that I often find I'll wear on Fridays because my energy is waning, and it just gives me that extra jolt. It also feels very in alignment with my brand of color outside the lines. Then there are other times where I feel really grounded and confident when I wear burgundy. That's another one of my power colors. It just makes me feel luxe, but also like there's so much richness to it. It just has a calming.

But I also like blues, like every form of blue. I think they help make me feel really calm. So do you see how using color in a little bit more of a flexible way when you're thinking more about alignment and authenticity, as opposed to very strict Pantone colors that you have to abide by, can create a whole different vibe?

I want to give you another tangible example here because I think it's helpful to think about women who we consider to be personal brands and who we consider to be influential. No better example comes to my mind than Michelle Obama. Now, I want you to think about Michelle Obama in her post-White House era because we all know that when she was at the White House, she really was dressing for a very specific political brand.

This isn't a comment about politics, but it's true. She had to fit a mold, and she did. She found herself in that mold as best she could, but at the end of the day, her expressiveness was restricted. But now, when she was going out on her book tour, it was like this whole new Michelle Obama came out, this freer, more expressive version of herself. She even talked about it in interviews, how this was a part of finding herself.

She was wearing really—there was one, I remember this bright, fully coordinated yellow suit—she’s wearing bold prints. She’s taking risks with her style. She’s wearing sneakers with her suits. It’s an energy. It’s a whole vibe. Does she have one particular brand color? No. But is her personal brand powerful? Yes.

So do you see the distinction there? These brands, when we think about personal brands, they aren't held up necessarily by color. They're held up by congruence. Everything about it—every single way that Michelle Obama showed up—it felt cohesive and true to her, even though it showed up in wildly different forms every time. It was exciting.

Big brands, as we've talked about, definitely use color to stand out from competitors. But for a personal brand, your competitors aren't going to be distinguishing you from another woman or man in your industry in that same way. Because what they can't replicate about you is your unique, authentic energy. Your differentiation is already built into you, who you are, and your color should reflect that energy of that brand personality, not be something that restricts it.

Maybe you're sitting there thinking, “Okay, well, I don't know what to do with this.” Maybe your brand color is pink, but today you want to mix it up. Well, maybe wearing an all-neutral outfit but a bold lip would still feel on brand to you. Or maybe some other iteration that's not necessarily wearing pink would still feel like your brand personality, but it's not necessarily leaning on that one color.

As I mentioned before, this is exactly how I approach my own visual brand, even though I have defined power colors. Again, power color is not a brand color. A power color is colors that shift my energy. What I'm thinking about in terms of my own visual brand is I'm thinking about, yes, I've got certain colors that I do use in my social. I love burgundies. I have a cream I use. I have this beautiful blue color.

But what I'm thinking about when I'm getting dressed for keynotes or for an interview on a podcast is my whole mantra of color outside the lines. Or you'll often hear me say, stop blending in and start standing out. So when I'm showing up and I'm visible, I want to be wearing something that affirms that message.

If I show up in something totally bland that matches what I know everyone else will be wearing, or what is a standard of what I know, that's off-brand for me, and it's not a performance, it's really just who I am, that is the energy I want to bring to my visual brand.

When I think about my time back in the ad agency when I was proofing and strategizing on ads and campaigns, we were obsessing about the Pantone colors. My eyes were so tuned into these Pantone colors for my clients that I just knew, yes, that was aligned or no, it wasn’t aligned. And that totally made sense there in that forum.

But when it comes to personal branding, what matters isn't perfect color consistency. It's authentic consistency. The through line of your brand should be about how you make people feel. Let's let color be a part of that story, but let's not make it the entire story.

Okay, so bottom line, big brands, corporate brands, have taught us that color is your brand—for good reason, because they've used it to create quick recognition. But we're talking about your own personal brand, and personal brands use color to create resonance and tell a story.

I'm really curious to know what you're all thinking about this because I know for certain that there might be women who are hell-bent on sticking to their color and say, “I totally disagree with you.” There might be others where you're like, “Gosh, I never thought about it this way.” There might be others who are like, “Oh, finally, I've got an excuse to change up my outfits.” I welcome all of those opinions.

I would really love to know what this has gotten you thinking about. So email me, go on my website on the links in the show notes, and message me. Or you can go on my socials on Instagram, send me a message, or on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you.

If this is something that has gotten you thinking about your own wardrobe and thinking about how you could do a better job of making sure that your style is on brand with what you've created, this is exactly what I do. This is what I love to do—make sure style is part of your brand story.

You can work with me either in a group setting. I have a waitlist right now for my 2026 group called The Visibility Edit. You can get on the waitlist for that. That's in the show notes. Or we can work one-to-one on this. I have a program called The Standout Style Kickstarter Program where it's just you and me, and we're hashing this out together.

I would love to be a part of your story. I would love to help you bring your style into the conversation in an even stronger way. So go to the show notes for that. But if you don't remember anything else from this conversation, I hope that it has got you thinking a little bit differently about what it is that makes up you as a personal brand.

I'm hoping that you're realizing it isn't just color, and you can give yourself a little bit of a break. With that, I will see you in the next episode.

Thanks for joining me on The Visibility Shift. If something in today's episode made you pause, rethink, or gave you permission to stop playing small, it would mean so much to me if you'd leave a review at ratethispodcast.com/visibilityshift.

If you're ready to stop second-guessing and start showing up as the leader you are from the inside out, The Visibility Edit is where that shift begins. Head to elliesteinbrink.com to learn more and join the next round. Because the next version of you, she's not waiting for permission. She's waiting for you. Let's make it visible.