Authentic Branding Means Ditching Stock Images
Whatever your business you have no choice but to operate and advertise in a highly visual world.
Through websites, social media, and even hard copy promotion such as banners, trade show booths and magazines, using images greatly improves brand awareness. It allows potential customers to better understand and build trust in your brand and the products and services you are selling.
Trust in a brand is born out of authenticity. Research in 2021 by communications firm Edelman, found that 81% of consumers consider brand trust when making their purchase decision, but that over 50% of consumers think that brands ‘trust-wash’, which means they aren’t committed to the purpose they’re talking about. (Smith 2021).
Branding agency BFTP, note that…
“a brand will need to work harder to reach its target audience… even when it’s the ONLY solution for that audience. Customers are becoming poised to distrust.”
'Trust washing' is an easy trap to fall into whether it is telling your market what you think they want to hear rather than what you believe, or using stock images across your website and marketing.
Stock images are highly generic and, if they are any good, will most likely appear in competitor's marketing too. Examples of stock reuse are pretty common: In the mid-90’s Jen Kind (nee Anderson) became what The Inquirer called "The Everywhere Girl", as she graced the publicity material of Gateway, Dell, HP, Visa, Microsoft and appeared in hundreds of brochures and textbooks.
(Walker 2022)
I recently had the pleasure of working with the Digital Production Partnership to create a bespoke image portfolio for them so that they could move them away from using stock images - or simply using no images at all - and create a visually rich authentic image library for their organisation.
The DPP is the international association for media and technology. Their aim is to bring the industry together to address the technology and operational needs of the media businesses.
“The way you look is integral to your brand. Some organisations turn to stock photos - but in our view that is a terrible mistake. It suggests your company doesn’t really understand imagery, because it is content with something generic; it suggests you lack the experience or expertise to have generated images of your own; and, most of all, it feels inauthentic.””
Commissioning your own images to use instead of using stock, can seem an overwhelming task. Marketing teams are usually stretched so thin they are not able to even consider the prospect of managing the shoots needed to build their own library, let alone finding a photographer. Even if their solution to that sourcing issue is to just find a friend with a 'proper' camera.
Borrowing from my background in Product Management, I have created fixed price packages for clearly defined outcomes so that customers never feel they’re about to write a blank check for a vague hope of getting good quality images.
Then I put my Project Management hat on to proactively take on the coordination of each shoot. For the DPP library project, I worked with three of their partner organisations to arrange the shoots that built the image library. This involved supplying risk assessments beforehand and ensuring all model release forms and licensing agreements were in place to guarantee DPP exclusive access to the images they've commissioned. Other than project check-in meetings between shoots, the creation of the library required minimal effort from the DPP team themselves.
Cranefield, R (2023-24). DPP Image Library Samples
The contents of the library are quite varied. Whilst there it is nearly impossible to get away from technology as a backbone of the industry the brief was to major on the people that were involved in its use. A large part of the library is of operations teams and the environments they work in. There is also a focus on sustainability with Sky Studio’s electric busses, staff cycle shop and vehical charging points included in the catalogue.
Investing in your own image library has extraordinary value in developing a constant visual presence that costs nothing beyond the original commission. An image I shot for Red Bee Media in 2013 is still in use some 10 years later and has appeared hundreds of times in trade magazines and online journals.
Cranefield, R (2013). Image courtesy Ericsson.
A ubiquity that would not have come from a stock-image that would have cost for each use and most likely appeared on competitors’ powerpoints or been emblazoned on the side of their exhibition booths if it had been part of the ShutterStock inventory.
In his book "The Post Truth Business", Sean Pillot de Chenecey talks of the challenge of addressing the sceptical customer and the need for organisations to make regular and consistent demonstrations of how the brand's trust-worthy values are being actioned.
“There are few things more powerful than a good brand strengthening their engagement by providing informed customers with a transparent view of the brand.”
And thats where my approach to creating authentic, yet affordable brand imaging comes in.
“As a business, we are now able to use images that are of high quality, distinctive and tailored to us, across all our different strands of work. We have a license to use those images freely, which means we have the right photographs to hand whenever we want them. It ensures our webste and our publications are always attractive and authentic. We see professional photography as a key part of our marketing - and that makes the cost very affordable compared to many other forms of marketing spend.”