Lifestyle Photography and Brand Identity

Clients and customers typically don't have time to slave through your business's website to understand what it's about. This would be an issue if brand identities and visual storytelling weren't real things. Both expedite the process of telling customers what your business is about.

Brand identity and visual storytelling intersect to form lifestyle photography. This is a kind of photography focused on telling stories about peoples' lives through photos. 

If executed correctly, lifestyle photography can help develop a company's brand image through visual stories about its customers, employees, and others. Ask and answer these questions if you want to use lifestyle photography to enhance your brand identity. 

What Do You Want to Show?

It's impossible to condense everything about your business into your brand image, so you need to prioritize. For instance, if you run a geriatric physical therapy clinic, you should prioritize showing photos of patients’ success stories. 

What you want to show is largely determined by what you want people to think of when they think of your business. But more importantly, it needs to be an evolutionary process. Forinstance, at one point, the above physical therapy clinic may have wanted to show patient recoveries to inspire others. At another point, they may use photos of their doctors to convey their expertise or commitment to their patients. 

What's Your Brand's Theme?

Consistency across the elements of your brand identity is critical to developing a brand image. For example, if your brand isn't defined by a consistent color-scheme, seeing color won't cause people to think of your brand. As a result, you should establish a consistent theme, genre, color-scheme, etc.

This will, again, vary between each business. A tourism agency may photograph tourists as they move through different natural and historical monuments. The consistency here is in the environment in which they take the pictures. In contrast, a gym may photograph their clients' body transformations and consistently pair before and after photos.

Who's Your Audience?

Lastly, your models should be similar to your target demographics. For instance, the geriatric physical therapy clinic won't use university students in their photographs. Presenting stories of people similar to your clientele will arouse their interest and, more importantly, leave an impression. 

Depending on your business, answering these questions can be difficult. For instance, you may not know which stories you want to tell through the photographs. In these situations, it's best to work with a lifestyle photographer to brainstorm and form a coherent plan for your brand identity. 

If you're looking for lifestyle photography in Medford, Oregon or anywhere else, contact me. My name's Adrien King, and I focus on fashion, family, product, and more kinds of lifestyle photography. Get in touch, and we'll work together to develop your brand identity.