Micro Merchandising
Reviewing a few pictures of the product catalog I am building for a new client website, one of my colleagues interrupted to say ‘Wait a minute. I don’t know what I’m looking at!”. She explained there were a lot of things going on in the picture and that the merchandising side needed work. The elements of the catalog were to show the various details of the product.
But looking at the work I noticed there were a lot of questions left unanswered by the product descriptions. Having worked for a retail catalog before, I knew that the backflow of this would be that any questions would be bridged at the sale point, which in classical marketing theory is too late. Rethinking the concept of marketing the items meant redoing a lot of photography.
One element of photography I have heard a lot about lately is white balance. This is one of those terms which is called by a name that confuses you until you realize the term really denotes a meaningful concept, it just has the wrong name. The white balance indicates a solid color or silver or white so the rest of the photographic hues can recalibrate to match an industry wide standard.
Reviewing the images told me that some of the images were striking but had a color balance that made the buyer perceived either color or material differently than they actually were. Since this catalog company could not afford to build a clientele based on inexact or inaccurate information published and disseminated to the public, some of the earlier image series had to be redone. The concept behind the new pictures was that they had to show as much detail as possible.
The problem comes when you are looking to promote certain aspects of a product and the immediate references on the website do not uniformly align with the promoted standards. this can be expensive to support when a professional merchandising policy is at stake. But the overriding purpose of the images is to promote the products, and promote their sales. So the marketing aspect must come first.
The emphasis on product detail at the possible expense of overall artistic composition and visual appeal. That is the challenge for the micro stock photographer for product quality and display purposes. The image files must be used in a manner consistent with a business philosophy that encourages transparency. It will be for the cover photo of the catalog to merit the most pleasing or visually appealing shot of the day.
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August 28th, 2009
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