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Ziffl3 wrote:
Notice quality of photography may not be used by the client as an item in the decision.
Your integrity, honesty, what you wear, your southern draw or New York-uptown attitude
........ all = brand
Integrity, honesty, what you wear, your southern draw, or New York-uptown attitude may not be used by the client as an item in the decision either.
I'm still honestly shocked that some are seeing my viewpoint as weird (although quite a few have read between the lines and understand where I'm coming from).
Photography is such an important part of shaping a brand and marketing in businesses in general that it seems rather obvious that your photography is going to shape your visual brand if you're running a photography business. Two of my favorite photographers are known for reshaping the brands of fashion houses with their risque editorials (Bruce Weber ring a bell?), totally changing the way a company is perceived (Branding). Read about how Tom Ford and Mario Testino used photos effectively in this manner in the mid '90s to help a struggling house known as Gucci.
How the heck is it unreasonable to believe that visual branding suddenly doesn't work in a friggin' photography boutique or shouldn't be the easiest way to connect with our clientele considering we're PHOTOGRAPHERS? Is it absurd to believe that a ton of the photographers here in this very forum have work that speaks for itself?
When you get hired for a job the longstanding prerequisite is experience, education, and references. When people shop for a car they look up reviews, check reports, get specs, and tons of other information on the physical performance, they then take a test drive. Those are all physical, tangible reasons to ACT on the emotional feeling they had, and afterwords their contentment will lie in the physical reasons for liking or disliking it. There's a reason Hondas hold their value longer than Dodges, and it's not because of emotion and jedi mind tricks, their cars are known to physically last longer, which creates a larger demand for them in the used car market, this isn't something we've been led to believe, it's actually quite truthful, of course because of this we now have some cool branding hyperbole such as, "Hondas Last Forever", but it's because of actual reasons of substance.
Also a side note:
One thing I notice is that a lot of photographers view their photography as a "service". Professional Photography isn't a service, it's a tangible, and taxable product that is delivered to the client. The service I provide is making people feel happy, beautiful, emotional, and nostalgic for the years to come, that's not taxable, or tangible, that's the brand. I sell it USING the photos themselves though which creates that mental reaction, and my pricing scheme reflects it, with a main focus on selling full coverage. Currently it works for me, because I have an intense focus on shooting good and making the client feel good while doing it, after this year, who knows, maybe I'll just get burnt out. Whatever, the focus is on the product that the client gets in their hands, that's what sets off everything else.
I was actually fortunate enough to get a better explanation of what TRR meant through PM, and it actually makes a lot of sense and he's right thinking the way he thinks.
But I just think this issue isn't dogmatic at all, and a few people are viewing it as such, the difference in opinion concerning where the place of branding lies in your business, and more importantly what physical characteristics can attribute to a brand, whether it's a smile, a specific selling technique, or photos, or all of this stuff plus a million other things, seems very subjective to the business owner, and we see that people have found success through both of the routes.
Edited on Feb 09, 2010 at 12:54 AM · View previous versions
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. The only reason for your business to exist is to support the life you want to lead. Why you do what you do in order to support that life you want to lead is your brand. It becomes a managerial accounting issue to determine how much work you can and do want to do, what price point you must set it at, and what you will create. This is why I say on a functional level that the brand must come first in order to run a professional business. If you want to run a hobby the products and services can drive things all day long, but I can tell you from expertise and experience that almost NEVER results in a profitable business. When you decide to run a pro photography business, you have to let the business drive. As I said before, this isn't a bad thing, or a dirty thing. It is actually a very creative and soulful thing if done right.