Whether you are starting a new brand, or working on a growing or established brand, the problem of maintaining consistency of images is a one that is relevant for any marketing person.
How you approach the problem of brand consistency in photography depends on what stage of development your brand it. Generally there are 3 stages your brand may be:
1. New Brand
2. Growing Brand
3. Established Brand
1. New Brand Photography
If you are just starting to build your brand, while you may have clear ideas of what you would like the brand will be, you still don't know what your customers will want your brand to be. You can't be comparing your business to established multinationals and how they do things now, a logo or a slogan isn't going to make or break your business.
While it is possible to hit a homerun by starting a brand and have it become a hit right off the bat, this is highly unlikely to happen. Usually you will go through a lot of trial and error before you achieve any meaningful traction. So at this point, while you may want to want your images to be something very specific, you really need to focus of working with creatives that help you produce high quality clear image that will help customers understand your product and buy it if it is interesting.
In fact you should be trying different creatives and give them creative freedom to apply their own aesthetic to your product photography images, this will give you a chance to test and see what works best with your demographic. Of course it is easier to test when you have many products in your catalog, but if you only have one product you can also try this, specifically in social media posts and maybe A/B testing on your site, to see which version sells best.
Why test with different creatives and styles?
- new brands simply don't know what will work in terms of connecting with your customer case. You may think that you know, but you don't know, at the early stages you only have assumptions. Once you try different things and have numbers, then you have a clear idea of what is working for your product and your market.
- if you have some very specific idea for what your product photography and lifestyle photography images should be, it is likely that you do not have the budget to produce them. Custom photography projects with high requirements is more time-consuming and therefore more expensive, than projects with more flexible requirements. At the end of the day, a good image will sell, as long as you have a good product and a compelling offer, even if it isn't exactly the images you envisioned, as long as is it a good quality photo it will sell. In terms of product photography a green plant to the right, or vintage look of the overall image isn't going to have any major impact your sales at this point. Very often new brand owners are very nervous and have very particular expectations of what image should look like, without having the budget for the production that will produce those particular results. While we understand the nervousness, our advice to new brand clients is always to get the photos done, not perfectly done, launch your products, and start collecting sales data.
2. Growing Brand Photography
OK, so your brand has gained traction and consistent sales growing month over month, you have a large catalog of images, and have worked with many creatives, you know what product photos and lifestyle photo work better, and want to create brand consistency. Ideally, when customers open your website's product catalog, they should see images that are consistent in terms of shadows, colors, and angles. When someone browses though your brand's social media accounts, a clear brand identity should be apparent through your social media photos. You should definitely be working on creating that strong brand identity that will help you grow even more.
So how do you create consistency in brand imagery when working with multiple products and multiple creatives?
If your brand is growing the first step you need to do in terms of photography is create a Brand Manual for Imagery. This is essentially a collection of all your major photo types (product photos, lifestyle photos, campaign photos, videos, social media photos), and clear descriptions of what you want the photos to look like in terms of colors palettes, lighting set-ups, shadows, focus, lenses, cameras, logo positioning (if you logo is visible on your products), desirable props, post-production style, and framing.
Since your brand already has a large catalog of images, you just need to go and select the images that work and use them to create a guide how to take more of this type of images. You also needto select what does not work and include it in the manual as "what not to do". After the manual is ready, make sure everyone who is involved in marketing and image production receives a copy and reads it carefully.
Having a Brand Manual for Imagery will help you immensely to keep on track as time go by, because not everyone will stay with your company forever, and you will also need to hire more people on your team. The brand manual will help everyone stay on the same page, makes training newcomers easy, and also serve as a reliable guide when a creative gets off track.
3. Established Brand PHOTOGRAPHY
When your brand is established you will typically have multiple creative projects going on all at the same time, product launches, marketing campaigns,video production and the challenge becomes more of how to achieve consistency in volume, rather than what images are on brand. Whether you have an in-house studio and production team, or you outsource photography production, or a mix of both, it is not easy to consistently create great images that are on brand and that don't cost a fortune. Overwork a team, and the quality of the photos and videos they produce will go down.
In-house photographers often burn out, because they run out of fresh ideas, the same is true about working with the same team. Ideally, you should have a few different teams that are not overworked and that are also fairly compensated, otherwise quality will decline. To choose good teams to work with you, find creatives and introduce them the brand first, rather than jumping into a specific project and asking for pricing. Of course product photography pricing is a very important part of deciding which creative/ company to go with, but you will have much better results if you make the creatives excited about your project first and letting them know what your are looking to achieve with the images that isn't just make something like X for budget Y.
The best thing you can do once your brand becomes established is to have a dedicated production manager, or if you have a huge image production demand, a whole creative services team that will manage all projects. There are some software options on the market that can help your producers manage projects.
