Color Psychology in UX: What M&M's Can Teach Brand Design Teams

Color choices in brand design are rarely as arbitrary as they look — but they’re often defended as if they were. When M&M’s retired their tan candy in 1995 and later sparked a culture war over the “feminisation” of their characters, they accidentally ran one of the most-watched public experiments in color perception and brand equity. UX Collective’s deep dive into the M&M’s color saga is easy to dismiss as confectionery trivia. It shouldn’t be.

Why Color Is a Data Asset, Not a Decoration Decision

The M&M’s case, as Rita Kind-Envy documents in UX Collective, illustrates something that conversion rate optimisation teams already know: color encodes meaning before the brain consciously registers it. Warm reds and yellows trigger appetite and urgency — which is why fast food and flash-sale UI look eerily similar across cultures. Cool blues signal trust and restraint, which is why fintech apps from GCash to GrabPay lean into them hard.

What makes this commercially interesting is the measurable gap between “brand color” and “performance color.” A brand’s hero palette, built for recognition and positioning, often collides directly with the colors that drive clicks, completions, and conversions in a live UI. Running both in the same interface without a deliberate hierarchy is how you get beautiful screens that don’t convert. The discipline is in knowing which color is doing which job — and giving each the right surface area.

The Southeast Asia Complication: Context Shifts Color Meaning

The M&M’s controversies were largely Western in their cultural reading — gender associations, nostalgia, brand personality debates. In Southeast Asia, the same color psychology framework applies, but the cultural weights are different enough to matter commercially.

Red signals luck and prosperity across much of the region, which is why Shopee’s UI leans into it so aggressively during 9.9 and 11.11 campaigns — it’s not just brand consistency, it’s cultural alignment with purchase intent. Green carries religious significance in Muslim-majority markets like Indonesia and Malaysia, making it a risky default for error states or discount badges. White, used freely in Western minimalist UI, reads as mourning-adjacent in several Southeast Asian contexts and can undercut premium positioning in unexpected ways.

For regional design teams managing multi-market campaigns — a single Lazada storefront serving Thai, Vietnamese, and Filipino users simultaneously — these aren’t edge cases. They’re baseline requirements that need to be encoded into the design system, not left to individual designers to navigate on deadline.

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From Craft Tools to Design Systems: The Jiro Parallel

Hyejin Song’s archival project documenting the tools behind Jiro Ono’s kitchen — covered by It’s Nice That — is ostensibly about sushi utensils. But the argument underneath it is about how mastery lives in the specificity of your instruments and the intentionality behind every choice. Jiro doesn’t pick up a knife arbitrarily. The tool selection is the first design decision.

The same logic applies to color governance in brand design systems. The failure mode for most mid-to-large brands isn’t choosing wrong colors — it’s having no principled system for when and how each color gets used across touchpoints. A brand might have excellent primary and secondary palettes, then watch them get diluted across a dozen agency partners, three regional teams, and a performance marketing function that’s A/B testing button colors without reference to anything. The craft erodes not through malice but through absence of documented intent.

Building a color governance layer into your design system — documenting the why behind each color’s role, not just the hex codes — is the difference between a brand that looks consistent and one that performs consistently. For design leads managing regional Southeast Asian rollouts, this means the system needs to accommodate market-specific overrides without fracturing the core brand logic.

Implementation Pitfalls and the Mobile-First Reality

Most Southeast Asian users will encounter your brand color decisions on a mobile screen first, often in variable ambient light conditions — bright outdoor environments, older mid-range Android devices with inconsistent colour calibration. Colors that look authoritative on a calibrated MacBook can render muddy, washed-out, or visually aggressive on the devices your actual users are holding.

Three implementation considerations that get skipped too often: First, test your brand palette on real mid-range devices (a Redmi or a Galaxy A-series), not just design workstations. Second, ensure your contrast ratios hold up under WCAG 2.1 AA standards — not for compliance reasons alone, but because low contrast destroys conversion on small screens in sunlight. Third, if you’re running campaigns across LINE, TikTok, and Meta simultaneously, your color system needs explicit guidance for each platform’s compression and rendering behaviour, because the same asset will look materially different across them.

The M&M’s lesson, ultimately, isn’t about candy. It’s that color carries commercial weight whether or not your team is treating it that way. The brands that systematise that weight — that turn color intuition into color infrastructure — are the ones whose design decisions compound over time rather than cancel each other out.

As AI-generated creative scales across the region and design teams face pressure to produce more assets faster, the question isn’t whether color will continue to matter. It’s whether your organisation has built the governance to ensure that the color decisions being made at speed are the right ones — or whether you’re just moving faster toward inconsistency.

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At grzzly, we work with brand and digital teams across Southeast Asia to turn design decisions into measurable commercial outcomes — including the kind of color governance and design system work that makes regional scaling actually coherent. If your team is navigating multi-market brand consistency or trying to close the gap between beautiful design and performance design, we’d like to think alongside you. Let’s talk