How to Develop Your Brand’s Photography Style — Guidelines

Research suggests we are more likely to remember content with images than text. Are your images making your brand memorable?

Without the right visual content, your brand’s message is not getting heard. These guidelines will help you develop your brand’s photography style and ensure the right message gets delivered through the right visuals!

Content

When choosing photographs for your marketing, you should pick the ones that not only target the audience you are going after but also truly reflect your brand. The types of images you select and their features will affect the user’s reactions. To illustrate this, let’s take a look at two car brands: Jeep and Tesla.

Jeep focuses specifically on telling people to go out and explore, using their vehicle as an enabler to making lasting memories with family and friends. So the photographs they feature on their website and social media focus largely on places and people who represent the ‘Jeep Lifestyle.’ On the other hand, Tesla focuses on luxury, value, and the uniqueness of their vehicle. Thus, their photography is oriented towards the vehicle itself, not necessarily the people and their experiences.

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Composition

Photo composition is crucial to maintain a brand aesthetic and should be the core of your concerns when defining your brand’s photography style. It includes your color palette, type of photography, logo positioning within the picture, casting and styling, the environment, lighting, editing, and more.

Your composition should be consistent and coherent. Determining how the elements of a photo are arranged in order to tell a story within the frame is going to determine your brand and link the images to it specifically.

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Complexion

The colors, texture, and appearance will determine your photograph’s character. Thus, the complexion of your photographs should incite the feeling you want your audience to associate you with.

Take the beauty brand Glossier, which is all about simplifying makeup and skincare. Their clean and minimalistic aesthetic is shown across their packaging, website, and social media. The people-centric photography with full-face shots and close-ups of diverse models, product-centric photography with light pastel colors and solid backgrounds, as well as their UGC, effortlessly mirrors the brand’s aesthetic.

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Connection

Several studies show that consumers want a more personal connection in the way they gather information and that people engage more in storytelling. Therefore, the subjects in your photos should carry emotions and help communicate how your product makes people feel.

Take Coca-Cola: the brand no longer focuses on communicating that it manufactures soft drinks, instead it chooses to focus on communicating the feeling of happiness — which is portrayed in all campaigns through genuine moments of joy with the drink being the common denominator.

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Conveyance

Every aspect of your brand’s photography should convey your story. How do you want your audience to perceive your brand? Remember that people naturally want to see themselves reflected in the brands they consume.

Bumble, for instance, aims to elevate its mission through its photography and has clear brand guidelines to support its “photography principles.” They seek to evoke feelings of empowerment and belonging by depicting real people and believable experiences that are not idealized, showcasing authentic moments and a variety of relatable moods. Therefore, the brand focuses on photos that look natural, shot at eye-level, taken on a phone, no clutter. Bumble even follows their community practices: “no group photos, no covered faces, no bathroom mirror selfies.”

When it comes to product photography, the brand follows the same natural and realistic setting while representing how it fosters connections and genuine moments.

Now that you know how to develop your brand’s photography style, try creating some new visuals that fit into it. With Cherrydeck Branded Stock you can obtain hundreds of branded pictures without shooting planning or high budget commitments. Get to know more, here.

If you own an e-commerce store, here is all you need to know on product photography for eCommerce websites.

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In case you still need help compiling your brand’s photography guidelines, access this insightful pdf we put together for you.