!44: What Does Your Product Photography Say About Your Product?

!±8± What Does Your Product Photography Say About Your Product?

Ever since the invention of Papyrus there has been advertising and there is evidence of advertising prior to that in the form of petroglyph, pictogram, and wall painting. One can only assume that since the division of labor there has been advertising in one form or another otherwise how else would have our hunter/gatherer ancestors known to meet up from time to time to trade?

With that in mind, one of the definitions of advertising is, "The persuasive communication to an audience to take some action in regards to products, ideas, or services". And just like Cro-Magnon man made it to the annual gathering of tribes, today's consumers make it to providers to get what they need, want, and desire through advertising.

And the spectrum of how well that is done varies from the incompetent to being done too well (Kimberly-Clark has essentially lost all protections of its Trademark "Kleenex" due to the term being genericized).

While the vast majority of us would be hard pressed to come up with five more examples like "Kleenex" off the top of our head, we could probably rattle off like clockwork the advertisements that go squarely in the category of incompetent for quite some time. Clearly there is more bad advertising than good.

So what does our product photograph say about our product? Being objective about our own product or finding someone to give us acceptable feedback is both an extremely difficult and subjective task. Perhaps that is the wrong way to look at the challenge of presenting our product in a fresh and interesting way.

This much is for certain; an internet business competing with brick and mortar businesses has to compete with touch, feel, smell, texture, size, etc in a product photograph. How can we communicate these ideas in a photograph?

First, let's look at our website. Have we designed the site around our product or have we chosen a template and made our product fit the site? Many of us go with the template in the beginning but this should be on the top of the list of things to change once cash-flow starts becoming predictable. Once we switch our perception from, "How do I make my product look good on the site?" to "How do I want my site to support my product?" we are on the path to superior advertising.

Next, we need a lot of high quality pictures of our marquee products showing many different things. A close-up of the product often times reveal the texture of the material used in the making of our product. A shot with a common related item gives a distinct impression of the size. A flower gives a hint to the product's scent. A shot of manufacturing is a statement toward quality. A model wearing or using the product shows how it will look or how to use it. This list goes on and on and is limited only by the imagination.

Then we have to arrange our photography and supporting verbiage on our web-site in a coherent manner that will make the customer feel comfortable and confident in purchasing from an internet provider.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time, money, and energy into driving potential customers to our site. Once we get them there, we don't want to lose them by making a bad impression.