Good Photography Is Critical for Brands

Photography is uniquely capable of conveying emotion and telling a story. It’s an especially potent form of creative for companies in creating brand identity and developing emotional bonds with the customer base. In fact, since good and impactful photography can begin forming those bonds in a mere fraction of a second, the digital image has no equal in its ability to develop a brand and foster both the loyalty and recognition so essential for companies to find their footing and carve out market share.

Given our expertise in all facets of digital design and brand building, Foundery 5’s unique insights into the power of photography can lend companies critical guidance in connecting with their target customer segments and distinguishing themselves from a crowded marketplace. Good photography is a difference-maker that provides lasting benefits for companies of any industry. With a team of talented photographers capable of telling your story and highlighting the best qualities of your product or service, Foundery 5 is an invaluable partner for startups building their brand identity and creating enduring connections with their customers.

A Brand Environment Leads the Way

Although we’ve discussed the topic before, it’s importance bears repeating – your logo is not your brand. In fact, although fonts, color palettes, and visual brand basics like logos are incredibly vital in developing your brand, your overall brand environment is far more comprehensive and far-reaching.

A thorough brand environment establishes creative guideposts to help you stay on-brand, consistent, and true to your narrative. Although photography is inherently compelling and unique within your creative assets, ensuring it aligns with your brand environment helps maximize its impact with your audience. Much of this occurs with the communication between your marketing team and the photographers themselves, where everyone must be on the same page to tell your visual story as clearly and consistently as possible.

That’s where a concise and well-developed brand environment plays such an important role, giving the photographer established guidelines to hone their vision and transform a simple picture into an incomparable storytelling device. A photographer that is incapable of working within your established environment is ultimately doing your brand more harm than good by limiting the effectiveness of otherwise powerful creative.

Tell a Consistent Story

Likewise, a segmented and inconsistent brand loses its impact with the audience as it struggles to create and maintain the brand recognition every startup needs to develop market share. Therefore, as convenient and far-reaching as digital marketing has become in recent years, it can also be a slippery slope when messaging lacks consistency across an omnichannel strategy.

For your brand and creative to capture and maintain the gaze of a busy and distracted audience, your marketing must stay within your brand environment or risk diluting your message. Once again, this is an area where your photography must relay the same emotion, tone, and voice through social media, apps, inbound, packaging, and any other communication with your audience. Just like fonts, colors, copy, and your other visual assets, a disjointed approach to photography within your overall marketing strategy robs it of its strength and immediacy.

Find the Right Source

Of course, just like many other brand elements, there’s no shortage of photography sources that startups can use to integrate into their marketing. However, not all of those sources are created equally, so it’s important to weigh factors like budget constraints, brand environment, and quality when choosing between those different sources.

This is an area where many companies wrongfully assume that their limited resources automatically relegate them to stock photography databases that lack customization and a highly-tailored approach. Using our own team of photographers as an example, Foundery 5 combines affordability with a precise, curated strategy that allows an organization to work directly with a photographer to transform their vision into reality. Companies don’t have to rely on generic photos or DIY solutions to stay within budget, where those that work with a professional photographer can create a distinct competitive edge relative to a bland and uniform overall marketplace.

High Stakes

Obviously, photography is a tremendous opportunity for a startup to make a name for itself and utilize the audience’s natural inclination to absorb information and emotion through an image. However, as the old saying goes, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Bad photography can do just as much damage as good photography can help. Generic imagery washes out your voice and story, pushing your brand into the countless other businesses that blend into the background noise of a customer’s life.

From a design perspective, poor photos that don’t develop your identity and adhere to your brand environment can quickly create a muddled design. Confusing and distracting packaging or product marketing as well as a disjointed digital presence all work against you, your brand, and message, therefore eroding the loyalty and market share that startups need to thrive. A poor choice in either photos or photographers leads directly to bad first impressions with your enterprise, ultimately hurting your brand’s reputation.

Thankfully, companies aren’t relegated to amateur photography, stock photos, and visual elements that distract or, even worse, drive customers to the competition. With Foundery 5’s unique insights and team of experienced photographers, your story can be crisp, bold, imaginative, and true to your vision.