It’s surprising that some Business-to-Business companies don’t do more sophisticated branding like most Business-to-Consumer companies do. Their customers or clients are people who respond emotionally to the same visual cues as a consumer who buy toothpaste. One of the most important things you can do for your brand is to develop a visual language and be consistent in your messaging in both word usage and visual usage. Consistency is kind of like being a parent and having to continually reinforce a message about a curfew for example. If you let your kids do what they want from time to time, it gets harder for them to take you seriously when you want them to be home by midnight. The same goes for your company’s visual language. Unless you define what you are trying to convey and uniformly keep your photography on strategy, your customer or client base won’t take your company as seriously if your image styles are all over the map.
I pulled out an example of visual language that we developed for one of our clients. The client brand strategy revolves around a not so unique platform of “personal service’. What makes this personal service strategy more exclusive is an attitude that says “go ahead and challenge us”. This message is where we started when looking for the right kind of photo that conveys a confident professional.