Why looks are everything

How do imagery and visuals impact on how your company is perceived?

Car advertising is some of the glossiest around. Picture it - the car is blazing through the mountains, water droplets racing off the shiny body of the car, suddenly day becomes night, and headlights are shining bright. Honda has been knocking it out of the park with their creative advertising for years - their Ignition video serves as just one of their many examples.

Imagine for a moment if instead Honda had told us about their efficient manufacturing processes, their incredibly qualified engineers, the strength to weight ratio of their alloys, the fact that all the seats are adjustable within a range of 112 degrees. How would that advert make you feel? Not terribly excited.

So, are purchases mainly driven by rationality over emotion? The answer is no.

The point is that hard facts aren’t enough. Your business needs to look the part. So what is the correlation between brand and imagery? Imagery and brand are the closest of friends, and for good reason. Let’s look at Nike for a moment. Watching their adverts is an overtly visceral experience and it’s primarily about how they make you feel. The quality of their product is completely implied in the quality of the imagery. That athlete is in tip-top shape, that slow motion shot of them jumping over a bench is pin-sharp, that chase sequence looks straight out of a Bourne movie. That’s their brand. They are their imagery.

But if you’re not selling sportswear or cars. How does this apply to you?

Working with startup brands over the years, we’ve found that businesses often underestimate just how much their imagery says about them and how this impacts on their brand identity. Whether that’s the photos on their website or the footage in their latest promo. If you’re trying to communicate that your company is at the forefront of the market and doing something that no one else is doing, that feeling needs to come across in all of your media including the films you make and the photographs you use. This implied form of communication is incredibly powerful and feelings often trump facts. Feelings make people want to identify with your brand and they build trust.

There’s a place for emotion and a place for facts, and sometimes a bit of both is exactly what we need.