Product Imagery
What product images appeal to designers and specifiers?
Many built environment product companies struggle with developing the right mix of marketing assets. How much and where should you invest? Why does it cost so much? Can’t we just use the images from last year? The answers to these questions are not simple.
Most people understand the need to support product launches and promotions, but marketing teams must be more proactive to increase efficiency and effectiveness. Today, there are more and more ways to reach customers, with each channel demanding content. From email marketing to Instagram, a small asset library will be consumed in months.
It’s easy to understand why this work is reactive, and asset libraries are underfunded. Many pragmatic B2B (business-to-business) companies view product images as a necessary evil – spend as little as possible to support a sale. By contrast, B2C (business-to-consumer) companies understand that product images are their lifeblood. In many ways, B2B is becoming more like B2C. Even if you aren’t developing a direct selling or e-commerce channel, as many contract interior product companies are, B2B product providers must create awareness online and through social media alongside Adidas sneakers and Stüssy hoodies.
Marketing teams need to create assets proactively. Just reacting to needs as they arise and doing this work in dribs and drabs is the least efficient way to work. Create batches of images with a vision and a plan to ensure you have what you need when needed. Consider your asset needs creatively and expansively, refilling the bucket annually. A holistic asset strategy provides the best long-term return on investment when you compare costs with value creation.
Here are considerations for creating Asset Libraries. Even with emerging media being moving targets, teams are best served by seeing this work as an ongoing project to support the multifaceted needs of modern sales and marketing.
Audience and Use
Appealing to A&D (architects and designers) is a common pain point for contract furniture companies. Designers can influence the specification process, but product companies are often unsure how to appeal to this finicky bunch. Images are a litmus test. Creative specifiers care about image quality and often know the difference between unique imagery and generic stock photos. Create images that are yours alone and that you can own. Differentiated imagery that expresses your value is a tangible brand asset.
Sales and marketing activities require different support. Key brand images make first and lasting impressions, help with recognition and recall, and better express your unique value proposition. Your flagship images are worth an investment to make your mark. Later in the Customer Decision Journey, there are different image priorities. Late-stage selling may require more and different support, such as a full library of lower-fidelity images showing just the right setting, installation, or context that is good enough to make the sale.
Consider various audiences and use cases – designers, dealers, independent reps, marketers, and sellers – and outline the needs of a robust image program. These requirements are inputs of a system. Identifying overlapping needs and creating images in bundles will most efficiently address various concerns.
👉 How to address various needs of audiences and uses?
Inspire, then Assure
People tend to make decisions based on instinct. Often, we are inspired to act and backfill our choice with assuring details – first, our heart, then our head. This is a staple of advertising psychology that many manufacturing-oriented companies too often forget. While we imagine ourselves as logical, technical product details don’t inspire. Specifiers are people, too. Facts matter, but even in the B2B world, starting with a coherent, inspirational story is how to get customers to eat their vegetables – your product specs.
Because of this, create your image library in layers from Inspire to Assure. Start with higher-level images that align with your higher-level brand messaging, then drill down to the details with harder-working assets.
Brand Personality Imagery
Create images that reflect your brand story and personality. Does your company have one? If not, or if that story and personality aren’t clear, you might want to explore your brand identity first. These images should be more aspirational, suggesting what problems your brand solves at a high level. They may depict your products, but they may not. In any case, the products are less of a hero than the people using them or the environments in which they exist.
👉 How might images reflect your brand position and identity?
Product Environment Inspirational Imagery
Create images designed to inspire, including your products in an appropriate context. These are likely full environments in a real environmental setting. If the product is designed to appeal to a market segment like office, education, or healthcare, show it in a contextualized but aspirational context. Can it be used in multiple settings? Show each scenario. Does the product complement other products? Show them working together. Consider showing each context with different aesthetic options. You’re trying to plant seeds in the designer's mind. Does this image help me solve a client problem and fit the bill for a space I’m designing? How cool can it be?
👉 How to express the product value proposition?
Product Environment Functional Imagery
Create images that suggest product function or use. If the product is a collection, show how the pieces work together in different configurations. Does the product move? Demonstrate the motion, the action, and the result. How much of the fabric pattern must be shown to see the repeat? How can you illustrate performance characteristics? Diagrams and animations can help tell the story here. You might show stages, cutaways, or timelines to enhance understanding. In our YouTube-powered world, instructional videos are expected to be only a click away. What does the product do? How does it work?
👉 What makes the product unique or better?
Product Installation Imagery
Create images that show products in the wild. These might be somewhat less precious, but installations or case studies serve as important proof points. It’s great to have many quality installations showing the product used in different environments, configurations, textiles and finishes, and industries (if applicable). Offer installation examples to help a specifier find images that look like the project they're working on now.
👉 How might you create a lot of example images?
Product Detail Imagery
Create descriptive images that help them understand the product's physical appearance. Specifiers must understand the edge detail, know what that lever looks like, or see the fabric up close. You might have detail shots or renderings, exploded views, or 3D models I can spin and zoom in. You might have reference images for size or shape. People will want to know the physical details.
👉 What is it like up close?
Media
We can feel how fast technology is changing. Your asset plan needs to keep up with your competitors – and keep up in general. Today’s TikTok-enabled customer expects images with even higher energy, sound, and motion. These are new ways to add new depth and texture to your brand expression. It also provides opportunities for increasingly personal connections to make a more meaningful brand. Plan for a range of image types from hi-fi to low-fi, still and motion, meeting specifiers where they are and the file type they prefer.
Photography and Renderings
Excellent still images of your product are a must. While richer formats are on the rise, beautiful, informative, compelling static imagery will continue to be needed everywhere, from social feeds to sales presentations.
The debate between photography and rendering continues, even as rendering technology improves. Renderings are becoming increasingly convincing, and will serve more and more purposes. However, it’s still difficult to achieve some effects that designers with an acute sense of taste can distinguish. Even though renderings seem good enough, discerning specifiers may sense the difference.
👉 How might you align image sources with usage goals?
Video/Motion
Today, video cannot be an afterthought. Each of the asset categories above can be improved with movement. All consumers, including B2B specifiers, are acutely attuned to the motion picture and expect no less from product companies. Videos and motion graphics are becoming more the norm – and certainly an expectation as short-form video takes over content consumption patterns.
Think about creating video and motion assets as a system, with both short and longer-form treatments for use in social channels, on your website, and in sales presentations.
👉 How to inspire and inform with motion?
Visualization
Designers want to see the product in the right size, shape, color, and finish. In the past, a one-color line drawing plus a swatch was enough for specifiers to visualize their choices on a mood board, but visualization technology has come a long way. E-commerce experiences have taught people to expect to visualize product options quickly and easily. They’ll want to save variants for comparison and collaboration, even on their phone.
Of course, this is in addition to a general catalog of the available color and finish options. A comprehensive color, material, and finish experience will offer other trajectories of design exploration, from coordinated palettes to color trends.
Specifiers will also want to visualize what the specified product may look like in a particular environment of their choosing. It’ll be helpful for them to see an individual product among other specified products to see how they look together. Building space configurators gets complicated and in a hurry, but it will become increasingly commonplace and expected.
👉 How might you visualize specifications?
Image/Asset Downloads
Inspiring, understanding functionality, getting to know the details, and visualization all lead to wanting downloadable files. Along the way, specifiers will want to download an image, a graphic, perhaps even a movie, a product visualization, or a configuration.
In addition, specifiers want to access product details. What are the prices, dimensions, weight, or other performance metrics? This data may be on a website page, but they’ll want it in PDF form, too. You could provide other downloadable PDFs like lookbooks, application guides, pricing references, or brochures.
Designers will want downloadable product models for applications like DWG (AutoCAD), RVT (Revit), SKP (SketchUp), CET (Configura), and sometimes other technical file formats like IES files for lighting. These applications will continue to increase in functionality, and likely, more inspiration and assurance, in addition to specification and configuration, will occur in these apps themselves.
👉 How easily can you enable plug-and-play options?
Artificial Intelligence
The promise of AI-generated images is on the horizon. If we are to believe half of the rhetoric from Silicon Valley, it’s already in our backyard and will be taking us to a very different place in the coming years.
Descriptive product renderings are likely to become a given and will become increasingly easy with emerging technology. Generative AI is finding its way into social media and digital advertising with endless A/B testing. AI people are very hard to seem naturalistic. It may take some time before we emerge from that uncanny valley. However, creating iconic, differentiating, unique, and ownable images will remain an art, regardless of the tool.
Significant changes are likely, and we should pay attention to them. Many issues, including cost, ownership, and effectiveness, have yet to be resolved, so proceed with caution.
👉 How might AI affect your asset strategy?
People
Don’t Forget People
Will people use the product? We hope so, so you’ll want to show them, too. Too many product images of empty spaces risk looking like a dystopian movie. People in images can get tricky when hairstyles and clothes go out of style frequently, but it’s necessary to show them for scale and use and to demonstrate how they may enjoy your product. They also keep your product feeling current.
👉 How might people add life to your imagery?
Checklist
You may already know these things, but even world-class surgeons leave sponges in patients. A checklist can be helpful.
✅ Address various needs of audiences and uses.
✅ Express your brand position and identity.
✅ Express the product value proposition.
✅ Show what the product can do and how it works.
✅ Show installation examples.
✅ Show product details.
✅ Align image sources with usage goals.
✅ Inspire and inform with motion.
✅ Enable the spec to be visualized and shared.
✅ Make it easy to plug and play with downloads.
✅ Be cautiously optimistic about generative AI.
✅ People literally add life to your imagery.
All this can feel overwhelming and expensive. It can be, but it’s also necessary. In the end, you’ll pay the price either way by having fewer assets than you need, creating assets less efficiently, or losing sales to a competitor who made the investment.
Content marketing today means publishing, so many product companies are now publishers. Keep in mind how digital transformation is changing the role of sales and marketing. If done correctly, marketing should make sales easier. That isn’t to take anything away from salespeople. They’re the only ones directly in front of the customer and have unique wisdom to offer any organization.
Every company and segment is different, and not everything can be done at once, but the need is real. Like B2C companies, B2B companies will need to understand better the importance of building brands with robust asset libraries.
First impressions matter. So do second impressions. Just as one meeting won’t make a sale, one good image can’t do everything. The conventional wisdom is that it takes at least seven impressions before you get to a sale. Create a strategy so each step is planned with an image that fits the bill.
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