Branding Photography is a recent term that is being used in the marketing industry a lot, it applies to both corporate branding and personal branding but what is it?
Brand Photography
Brand Photography is photography that tells the story of your brand, this can be on your website, blog or social channels and is separate to product photography or brochure/catalog photography.
Instead of photographing your products to show off their best features, brand photography represents your brand voice, decisions are made from brand photography on things such as your company ethos, your company personality, what elements of your brand and company you want to share with your customer.
You can include brand photography within a product photoshoot with images such as behind the scenes, less formal product set ups, images of a figurehead and the products, also good product photography can be used alongside brand photography on social channels and blogs.
How to set up a brand photoshoot
Before you set up a brand photoshoot you need to decide on what you want to convey from your brand story. You need to work out what elements of your brand you want to include, are you data drive, do you pride yourself as being a ‘green’ company, do you want to have a figurehead or a number of figureheads at the front of the brand? Your brand tone of voice is important, a brand photography shoot for a corporate professional company would be very different than for a company that is lenient and uses more colloquial language and phrases.
Working with your photographer you can identify what elements are essential to the end photographs, your brand colours and colour palette should be incorporated not only with the styling but also the editing if you use a lot of red or blue then these need to be highlighted throughout the brand storytelling and planning of the shoot.
Considering where you do your brand photography is also important, sometimes a good location is needed, sometimes it will be done in studio, or we can build a set that represents the look you are going for. These decisions need to be made before the shoot to help the photoshoot run smoothly.
At Ikon we often do brand photography at the same time as video production or photoshoots to make the best use of the time, location, set and models booked.
Why do you need branding photography?
Most business will need some sort of branding photography, unfortunately, stock images do not work for businesses as well as they did, customers are more interested in seeing authenticity and recognise stock photos as not being part of the company.
Brand photography could be simple head shots and banner images on your website, but it can also be to support marketing campaigns with regular brand photography being taken and updated for use on social media, email marketing, stories and much more.
The same principals apply to your brand photography whether it is just a yearly shoot or monthly shoots, the outcome should be representative of who you are and your own journey as a company.
