If RSAC Had a Say, SecurityBlue Should Be a Pantone Color of the Year

RSAC 2026 was feeling blue. So blue, in fact, that nearly half of the booths on the show floor — 45.7% — had blue as their dominant color. That’s no longer a trend. It might even make it the default. A much distant second color choice was black, at 17.3%, followed by purple, orange, green, and red at roughly 7.4% each.

When nearly half the floor shares a single color, it’s no longer a design choice derived from creativity, but one made out of, ironically, security. It’s safe to look like everyone else in the room, but it means you’re not telling anyone why you’re different.

So, why harp on colors?

The investment in a vibe is just as important as the message you need to convey. In a hall where buyers are meeting dozens of vendors in a single day, visual distinctiveness is what drives recall. Recall is what drives a follow-up meeting. Follow-ups drive sales. Blending in turns a color/brand identity into a hit to your pipeline.

So, since we know there’s an inherent advantage to looking different, the brands who used colors like the ones in the chart below have a distinct opportunity to stand out, if they invest in it and match it to bold messaging.

But color doesn’t work alone. It has helpers that sometimes don’t help, even with the best of intentions. Things like imagery used on booths provide insight into how companies are trying to connect with attendees. Here’s how they showed up:

• Product Screenshots: 55.6% of booths featured product interfaces or dashboards, attempting to ground their claims in tangible software. When more than half of the floor is showing a dashboard, no single dashboard is standing out. A screenshot rarely closes a deal with a buyer who’s still in awareness mode.
• Icons: 46.9% utilized iconography to represent features or concepts. At this point, the lock icon and the shield graphic have become visual wallpaper. They signal a category, not a differentiator.
• People/Lifestyle: 30.9% incorporated photos of people, aiming for a more humanized or relatable brand image. This is the one with the most upside. Buyers don't buy technology. They buy outcomes for their teams and their careers. Human imagery shows that you understand that your solution is intended to make a person’s life a little better
• Abstract Patterns: 28.4% used abstract graphics or shapes. The difference between abstract graphics that work and abstract graphics that don’t is whether they’re part of a cohesive creative system or they’re just filling space.

So, let’s start solving this issue of Sameness by Design. I did a quick chart below to illustrate how to change things from blending in to bolding out.

As a side note, we noticed that 58.0% of booths utilize a dark background, a trend likely driven by the desire to make illuminated text and screens show up better than the booths around them. When the majority of the floor goes dark, a light or high-contrast booth becomes the anomaly. And anomalies get noticed.

So, how do we get started?

Glad you asked. A few places to start and consider for RSA Conference 2027:

• Audit your creative against the competitor field, not just your own brand guidelines. If you swapped your logo for a competitor and the booth still works, you have a problem. That doesn’t mean you have to fully rebrand. It’s quite the opposite: find new ways for that sameness to stand out.
• Lead with outcomes, not outputs. Product screenshots communicate capability. Human stories communicate value. Know which one your buyer needs to see first.
• If you’re going to be blue, be the most interesting blue vendor in the room. Color alone doesn’t differentiate your brand. But a bold color paired with a bold message will. That includes visual messaging, which can help you drive the eyes and the leads to your booth over someone else’s.

We can’t predict which tech brand will outpace everything else, but we can just about bet on some of those stacks being blue. If you want to stay different, you have to be willing to take risks in either the color you choose as your anchor or the experiences people have when they find you in that sea of lookalikes. Either way, we'll be there. And if you're ready to rethink what your brand looks like in a room full of sameness, let's talk before the next show floor fills up.