Brand Storytelling Through Advertising Photography
Brand storytelling involves communicating a specific narrative that aligns with your brand’s identity to your audience. Consistent marketing efforts through advertising photography is a great way to not only promote your brand across different channels, but is also a useful method to establish your brand’s voice to your audience.
Successful brand storytelling through photography might involve thinking about aspects of your company like your origin story, mission statement, demographic, and product features - and seeing how you can incorporate some of those ideas into the final images.
An advertising campaign will target a specific kind of lifestyle that you want to associate with your brand. As a result, creating a specific narrative with your brand storytelling can help make your advertising photos that much more effective.
Find Your Target Demographic
One of the most important factors concerning brand storytelling through advertising photography is understanding the audience you’re trying to reach in your campaign. Two businesses that are in the same industry might have different target audiences that they’re trying to cater towards. One business might want to launch multiple advertising campaigns and target a different audience each time.
As an example, two hotels are both launching an advertising campaign for the new year, but they both choose a specific style to target a certain demographic
Hotel 1: A hotel based in the city that creates an advertising campaign geared towards business professionals and luxury travel.
Hotel 2: A beach hotel resort producing an advertising campaign targeting vacationers and adventurers with ocean activities
You can specify your target audience by thinking about factors such as age, areas of interest, budget, and more.
Clearly defining these aspects of your demographic will be very helpful in determining what kind of advertising photography campaign you want to produce.
Campaign photo from my shoot with the Marina del Rey Hotel
“Brian was such a pleasure to work with. He is professional, comes prepared, and the best part – takes beautiful photos! He takes direction well but also has an amazing creative eye and catches beauty in every shot. He is humble and overall a great photographer to work with.”
Kiki Popa | Marketing Manager | Marina del Rey Hotel & Hilton’s Jamaica Bay Inn
Keywords That Define Your Brand
Sometimes I like to ask my clients for a few words that best describe their brand, or the type of photoshoot that they’re looking to produce.
They can be basic words like: adventurous, luxury, upbeat, or casual.
While the words themselves might not be enough to come up with an entire story for the brand photoshoot, it works as a great starting point. From these keywords, you can think about aspects like the model’s wardrobe, the location of the shoot, facial expressions, and more.
Your Environment
As an outdoor photographer, the location of the advertising campaign is a necessary aspect of brand storytelling. Adventure brands like Patagonia and Arc’teryx which sell outdoor gear and apparel feature models wearing their products in diverse landscapes and mountain ranges.
Alternatively, you’ll find that the majority of the social media images throughout the year from the brand “REEF” were taken at the beach.
When you have a location in mind for the photoshoot, you can start to produce a story that aligns with the environment you’re shooting in.
Of course your brand doesn’t have to stick to one location for each photoshoot. Instead, think about the story you want to tell with each campaign and try to focus on picking a location that makes sense and aligns with your brand, rather than choosing a location solely because it looks nice.
Creative Direction
Whether you’re working with models for a lifestyle product shoot or with employees of a company for a business branding shoot, the photographer should be able to work as a creative director to make sure that your brand’s story comes across in the final images.
Based on your company’s mission statement, keywords, location, the subjects of the photoshoot might already have a good idea of what to expect and the client can imagine what the final images will look like.
But when working with on-camera talent, you still want the images to look candid for the advertising campaign, as they’re meant to capture the authentic daily moments in the company or using the product.
For product-only advertising images, the photographer will focus more on the lighting and composition of the product in-frame and can focus on the technical aspects of the image rather than directing emotion from the talent.
Regardless of whether you’re just photographing a product or working with on-camera talent, consistency in brand imagery is important in a successful campaign with storytelling.
Examples of Brands with Great Advertising
Monos: The company features premium luggage and travel pieces with a focus on minimalism and sustainability. Monos lives by the philosophy “Travel mindfully”, in which they welcome an audience of travelers who are “immersed in the here and now.” Just from the different photos and campaign films on their website, you can see how they have carefully crafted their brand with a certain aesthetic that is consistent across all of their pages.
Solios Watches: Solios is a watch brand that focuses on sustainable practices and was the first watch company to get the B Corp certification. The photos on their website feature lifestyle images of people wearing their watches in casual and minimalistic settings that fit their brand perfectly.
This photo was featured on the main page of Bose’s website.
